The
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the investigative branch of
the United States Department of Justice, was established by Attorney-General
Charles
J. Bonaparte
(1851-1921) in 1908. The original function of the FBI was the investigation
of violations of federal law. However, it also assists the police
and other criminal investigation agencies in the United States.
In 1924 John Edgar Hoover was appointed
director of the FBI. Under Hoover's leadership, the FBI also became
involved in counter-intelligence activities. This included the collection
of information on those with radical political beliefs. For example,
the FBI secretly supplied information to Joseph
McCarthy and members of the House of Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC).
In 1961 William
Sullivan was appointed assistant director of the FBI's Intelligence
Division. Sullivan gradually moved up the hierarchy and eventually
became the FBI's third-ranking official behind J.
Edgar Hoover,
the director, and Clyde A. Tolson. Sullivan
was placed in charge of FBI's Division Five. This involved smearing
leaders of left-wing organizations.
Sullivan was a strong opponent
of the leadership of Martin Luther King.
In January, 1964, Sullivan sent a memo to Hoover: "It should
be clear to all of us that King must, at some propitious point in
the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro
followers as being what he actually is - a fraud, demagogue and scoundrel.
When the true facts concerning his activities are presented, such
should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal
and to reduce him completely in influence." Sullivan's
suggested replacement for King was Samuel Pierce, a conservative lawyer
who was later to serve as Secretary of Housing under President Ronald
Reagan.
William
Sullivan disagreed with J.
Edgar Hoover about
the threat to national security posed by the American
Communist Party and felt that the FBI was wasting too much money
investigating this group. On 28th August, 1971, Sullivan sent Hoover
a long letter pointing out their differences. Sullivan also suggested
that Hoover should consider retirement. Hoover refused and it was
Sullivan who had to leave the organization.
In 1975, Frank
Church became the chairman of the Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. This committee
investigated alleged abuses of power by the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Federal
Bureau of Intelligence.
The committee
looked at the case of Fred
Hampton and
discovered that William O'Neal, Hampton's bodyguard, was a FBI agent-provocateur
who, days before the raid, had delivered an apartment floor-plan to
the Bureau with an "X" marking Hampton's bed. Ballistic
evidence showed that most bullets during the raid were aimed at Hampton's
bedroom.
Church's
committee also discovered that the CIA and
FBI had sent anonymous letters attacking
the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers
to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to
destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins,
the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at
provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.
One of
those people targeted was Martin
Luther King.
The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden
in hotel rooms. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that
the recording would be released to the public unless King committed
suicide.
The
FBI under J.
Edgar Hoover collected
information on all America's leading politicians. Known as Hoover's
secret files, this material was used to influence their actions. It
was later claimed that Hoover used this incriminating material to
make sure that the eight presidents that he served under, would be
too frightened to sack him as director of the FBI. This strategy worked
and Hoover was still in office when he died, aged seventy-seven, on
2nd May, 1972. Clyde Tolson arranged for
the destruction of all Hoover's private files.
In its final report, issued
in April 1976, the Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
concluded: “Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and
undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech,
association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional
system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.”
William
Sullivan was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire,
on 9th November, 1977. An inquest decided that he had been shot accidentally
by fellow hunter, Robert Daniels, who was fined $500 and lost his
hunting license for 10 years.
Sullivan had been scheduled
to testify before the House Select
Committee on Assassinations. Sullivan was one of six top FBI officials
who died in a six month period in 1977.
Others who were due to appear before the committee who died included
Louis Nicholas, special assistant to J.
Edgar Hoover
and his liaison with the
Warren
Commission; Alan
H. Belmont, special assistant to Hoover; James Cadigan, document expert
with access to documents that related to death of John F. Kennedy;
J. M. English, former head of FBI Forensic Sciences Laboratory where
Oswald's rifle and pistol were tested; Donald Kaylor, FBI fingerprint
chemist who examined prints found at the assassination scene.
(1) John
Edgar Hoover,
testimony before the House
of Un-American Activities Committee
(26th March, 1947)
The Communist movement in the
United States began to manifest itself in 1919. Since then it has
changed its name and its party line whenever expedient and tactical.
But always it comes back to fundamentals and bills itself as the party
of Marxism-Lenninism. As such, it stands for the destruction of our
American form of government; it stands for the destruction of American
democracy; it stands for the destruction of free enterprise; and it
stands for the creation of a "Soviet of the United States"
and ultimate world revolution.
The
preamble of the latest constitution of the Communist Party of the
United States, filled with Marxian "double talk," proclaims
that the party "educates the working class, in the course of
its day-to-day struggles, for its historic mission, the establishment
of socialism." The phrase "historic mission" has a
sinister meaning. To the uninformed person it bespeaks tradition,
but to the Communist, using his own words, it is "achieving the
dictatorship of the proletariat"; "to throw off the yoke
of imperialism and establish the proletarian dictatorship"; "to
raise these revolutionary forces to the surface and hurl them like
a devastating avalanche upon the united forces of bourgeois reaction,
frenzied at the presentment of their rapidly approaching doom."
In
recent years, the Communists have been very cautious about using such
phrases as "force and violence"; nevertheless, it is the
subject of much discussion in their schools and in party caucus where
they readily admit that the only way in which they can defeat the
present ruling class is by world revolution.
The
Communist, once he is fully trained and indoctrinated, realizes that
he can create his order in the United States only by "bloody
revolution." Their chief textbook, The History of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, is used as a basis for planning their
revolution. Their tactics require that to be successful they must
have: (1) The will and sympathy of the people. (2) Military aid and
assistance. (3) Plenty of guns and ammunition. (4) A program for extermination
of the
police as they are the most important enemy and are termed "trained
Fascists." (5) Seizure of all communications, buses, railroads,
radio stations, and other forms of communications and transportation.
They
evade the question of force and violence publicly. They hold that
when Marxists speak of force and violence they will not be responsible
- that force and violence will be the responsibility of their enemies.
They adopt the novel premise that they do not advocate force and violence
publicly but that when their class resists to defend themselves then
they are thus accused of using force and violence. A lot of double
talk.
(2)
William
Sullivan,
memorandum to John
Edgar Hoover
(8th
January, 1964)
It should be clear
to all of us that Martin Luther King must, at some propitious point
in the future, be revealed to the people of this country and to his
Negro followers as being what he actually is - a fraud, demagogue
and scoundrel. When the true facts concerning his activities are presented,
such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal
and to reduce him completely in influence. When this is done, and
it can be and will be done, obviously much confusion will reign, particularly
among the Negro people... The Negroes will be left without a national
leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the
proper direction. This is what could happen, but need not happen if
the right kind of a national Negro leader could at this time be gradually
developed so as to overshadow Dr. King and be in the position to assume
the role of the leadership of the Negro people when King has been
completely discredited.
For some months I have
been thinking about this matter. One day I had an opportunity to explore
this from a philosophical and sociological standpoint with an acquaintance
whom I have known for some years.... I asked him to give the matter
some attention and if he knew any Negro of outstanding intelligence
and ability to let me know and we would have a discussion. He has
submitted to me the name of the above-captioned person. Enclosed with
this memorandum is an outline of (the person's) biography which is
truly remarkable for a man so young. On scanning this biography, it
will be seen that (Samuel Pierce) does have all the qualifications
of the kind of a Negro I have in mind to advance to positions of national
leadership....
If this thing can be set
up properly without the Bureau in any way becoming directly involved,
I think it would be not only a great help to the FBI but would be
a fine thing for the country at large. While I am not specifying at
this moment, there are various ways in which the FBI could give this
entire matter the proper direction and development. There are highly
placed contacts of the FBI who might be very helpful to further such
a step. These can be discussed in detail later when I have probed
more fully into the possibilities.
(3)
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, Pacific
News Service (3rd May, 1997)
It is known that,
with the blessings of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department relentlessly tried
to tie King to the Communist Party. This was not just Hoover acting
on his own obsessions, it was a war against the black movement. And
Hoover decided the cheap way to win that war was to discredit the
movement's most respected figure.
Hoover assigned the job
to assistant FBI director William Sullivan, who branded King "the
most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation." In his book,
"My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI," Sullivan said "There
were no fewer than 14 men with high-ranking positions who not only
never objected to the investigation of King, but because of Hoover's
pressure were vigorously behind it."
Sullivan coordinated the
"Seat of Government" committee, mostly special agents from
Washington DC and Atlanta offices, who deluged King with wiretaps,
physical surveillance, poison pen letters, and threats, and leaked
smear stories to the media.
(4)
Isobel
Lennart was interviewed by Robert Vaughn in 1970.
The FBI asked me a million questions.
They said they had information that I had been a member of the Young
Communist League when I was sixteen in New York. They wanted to know
about John Garfield and Bromberg. I had two sessions when they asked
me about names and I answered quite honestly. Then MGM called me in
and said: "We can't protect you any longer and this time you're
going to have to testify."
(5)
William
Turner, Hoover's FBI: The Men
and the Myth (1970)
At headquarters there
wasn't even a section working on organized crime. In the field, what
we did get on top mobsters was just dropped into the General Investigative
Intelligence file - to be forgotten.
(6)
Telephone
conversation between Lyndon
B. Johnson
and J.
Edgar Hoover
(23rd
November, 1963)
J.
Edgar Hoover: I just want to let you know of a development which I
think is very important in connection with this case. This man in
Dallas (Lee Harvey Oswald). We, of course, charged him with the murder
of the President. The evidence that they have at the present time
is not very strong.... We have the gun and we have the bullet. There
was only one and that was found on the stretcher that the President
was on...
Lyndon
B. Johnson: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet
Embassy in Mexico in September?
J.
Edgar Hoover: No, that's one angle that is very confusing. We have
up here the tape and this photograph of the man who was at this Soviet
Embassy, using Oswald's name. That picture and the tape do not correspond
to this man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears
that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.
(7)
William
Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI (1979)
At the heart of
Hoover’s massive public relations operation were fifty-nine FBI
field offices whose territory took in every village, town, city, and
county in America. Each day, out of these field offices streamed eight
thousand agents going into every state, city, and town, talking to
and becoming friendly with ordinary citizens from all walks of life.
Because of his network of field offices, and thanks to the scores
of contacts made and maintained by the special agents in charge, Hoover
was able to place "news" stories - invented and written
in the bureau, really nothing more than press releases, puff pieces
for the FBI - in newspapers all over the country. Our strength was
in the small dailies and weeklies; and with hundreds of these papers
behind him, Hoover didn’t give a damn about papers like the New
York Times or the Washington Post. Most of the men who
run small local papers are used to printing stories about grange suppers
on the front page; imagine how grateful they are for a story from
the FBI. Of course, scores of Washington-based reporters printed stories
we gave them too, and they usually printed them under their own bylines.
Some of them lived off us. It was an easy way to make a living. They
were our press prostitutes.
When I hear people talk
about a "new" FBI, I know that the changes they talk about
are only paper changes. This public relations operation of Hoover’s,
this massive attempt to control public opinion, continues to this
day, and it is at the very heart of what is wrong with the bureau.
Unless it is exposed, until every editor of every little weekly newspaper
who ever printed an FBI press handout realizes how he was used, the
FBI will do business in the same old way.
A massive, pervasive public relations operation is no substitute for
the job of investigating crimes. The FBI should conduct its business
quietly and it should earn its respect from the citizens of the United
States by the results of its work, not from the results of its propaganda.
(8) Final Report of the
Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect
to Intelligence Activities (1976)
According
to an FBI memorandum, this sharing of informant information was crucial
to police during their raid on the apartment occupied by several Black
Panther members which resulted in the death of the local Chairman,
Fred Hampton, and another Panther: " (Prior to the raid), a detailed
inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor plan of the apartment
were furnished to local authorities. In addition, the identities of
BPP members utilizing the apartment at the above address were furnished.
This information was not available from any other source and subsequently
proved to be of tremendous value in that it subsequently saved injury
and possible death to police officers participating in a raid on the
morning of 12/4/69. The raid was based on the information
furnished by the informant."
(9) Anthony
Summers, The Secret
Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993)
FBI dirty tricks,
the Senate Intelligence Committee later discovered, provoked "shootings,
beatings and a high degree of unrest" in the Black Panther movement.
For two Panthers in Chicago, the FBI tactics brought sudden death.
Fred Hampton and Mark dark died in a hail of gunfire, and three others
were wounded, when police burst into their apartment at 4:00 a.m.
on December 3, 1969. It later emerged that the police had fired ninety-eight
rounds, the Panthers - maybe - one.
In 1982, after persistent
litigation, the survivors were awarded $1.85 million in damages against
the police, in a case that revealed the killings had been the direct
result of action by the FBI. The Bureau had provided the police with
detailed information on Hampton's movements, along with a floor plan
of the apartment. Veteran agent Wesley Swearingen quoted a Chicago
colleague as telling him: "We told the cops how bad these guys
were, that the cops had better look out or their wives were going
to be widows. . . . We set up the police
to go in there and kill the whole lot."
(10) Arthur Murtagh, former
FBI agent, interviewed in 1990.
I certainly do not want to
indicate that Hoover did not have some unusual ability in structuring
an organization designed to perpetuate a sort of dictatorial control
of both the FBI and, so far as he could manage it, the minds of the
American citizens: but so did Adolf Hitler.
(11)
Peter
Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)
Such an explanation
is less plausible for the FBI's interference with leads that appeared
to be guiding its agents to the actual assassins of the President
- a case, seemingly, of obstruction of justice, or worse. How else
should one assess the response of FBI headquarters to a report from
Miami that Joseph Adams Milteer, a white racist with Klan connections,
had in early November 1963 correctly warned that a plot to kill the
President "from an office building with a high-powered rifle"
was already "in the working"? These words are taken from
a tape-recording of a discussion between Milteer and his friend, Miami
police informant Bill Somersett. Miami police provided copies of this
tape to both the Secret Service and the FBI on November 10, 1963,
two weeks before the assassination, and this led to the cancellation
of a planned motorcade for the President in Miami on November 18.20
Although an extremist,
Milteer was no loner. Southern racists were well organized in 1963,
in response to federal orders for desegregation; and Milteer was an
organizer for two racist parties, the National States Rights party
and the Constitution party. In addition he had attended an April 1963
meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc.,
which had been monitored by an informant for the Miami police. A Miami
detective's report of the Congress included the statement that "there
was indicated the overthrow of the present government of the United
States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity
to assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership
within the Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members
of the armed forces that secretly belong to the organization."
In other words, the deep
politics of racist intrigue had become intermingled, in the Congress
as elsewhere, with the resentment within the armed forces against
their civilian commander. Perhaps the most important example in 1963
was that of General Edwin Walker, whom Oswald was accused of stalking
and shooting at. Forced to retire in 1962 for disseminating right-wing
propaganda in the armed forces, Walker was subsequently arrested at
the "Ole Miss" anti-desegregation riots. Nor was the FBI
itself exempt from racist intrigue: Milteer, on tape, reported detailed
plans for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Hoover's FBI,
by the end of 1963, had also targeted for (in their words) "neutralizing
... as an effective Negro leader."
Four days after the assassination
Somerset! reported that Milteer had been "jubilant" about
it: "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding
you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered
rifle." Milteer also was adamant that he had not been "guessing"
in his original prediction. In both of the relevant FBI reports from
Miami, Somersett was described as "a source who had furnished
reliable information in the past."
(12)
New York Times (10th November,
1977)
William C. Sullivan,
former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations intelligence operations
who broke in dramatic fashion with the late J. Edgar Hoover, was killed
early yesterday in a shooting accident near his home in Sugar Hill,
New Hampshire. He was 65 years old.
Major Mason J. Butterfield,
law enforcement director of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department,
said that Mr. Sullivan, who had been on the way to meet two hunting
companions shortly after daybreak, had been shot and instantly killed
by another hunter, Robert Daniels, Jr., 22, who had mistaken Mr. Sullivan
for a deer. Major Butterfield said that the shooting was under investigation
and that no charges had been filed...
Mr. Sullivan, who acquired
a reputation as the only liberal Democrat ever to break into the top
ranks of the bureau, retired in 1971 after he arrived at his office
one morning to find that Mr. Hoover had ordered the lock on his door
changed and his nameplate removed. That incident, widely reported
at the time, was the culmination of increasing friction between the
two men over Mr. Sullivan's private, and then public, insistence that
Mr. Hoover had greatly overemphasized the threat to national security
posed by the American Communist Party while devoting less attention
than was warranted to violation of Federal civil rights laws in the
South.
Mr. Sullivan was known
both within the bureau, and by a wide and distinguished circle of
acquaintances outside it as less a policeman than a scholar, one whose
interests ranged from theoretical Marxism, on which he was an acknowledged
expert, to modern English poetry.
Mr. Sullivan held advanced
degrees from American and George Washington Universities and an honorary
doctorate from Boston College.
In retirement, Mr. Sullivan
became even more vocal of Mr. Hoover's nearly five decades of unchallenged
leadership of the bureau and of its controversial counterintelligence
programs, including some that he himself had conceived and administered.
Testifying two years ago
before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which termed some of his
official actions abusive and even illegal, Mr. Sullivan declared,
"Never once did I hear anybody, including myself raise the question,
is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal,
is it ethical or moral?"
The Senate investigation
uncovered considerable detail about the counterintelligence programs,
collectively labeled Cointelpro by the bureau, that were intended
to spread confusion and dissension among extremist political groups
in this country, ranging from the Communist Party on the left to the
Ku Klux Klan on the right.
It also developed in the
Senate investigations that Mr. Sullivan had been instrumental in the
arranging for the mailing of a tape recording in 1964 to Coretta Scott
King, wide of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that contained
snippets of Dr. King's conversations with other women that had been
overheard by concealed F.B.I. microphones.
Mr. Sullivan was in the
news most recently a few weeks ago when he acknowledge that he had
passed to subordinates instructions from Mr. Hoover to use whatever
means were necessary in tracking down fugitive members of the Weather
Underground organization in the early 1970's.
One former agent, John
J. Kearney, is now the subject of a Federal indictment charging the
bureau with having employed illegal wiretaps and mail intercepts in
those investigations, and Mr. Sullivan was expected to have been a
principal witness at Mr. Kearney's trial. Mr. Sullivan, whose hopes
for replacing Mr. Hoover as the bureau's director were dashed when
the Nixon Administration installed L. Patrick Gary as Mr. Hoover's
successor, infuriated many of his longtime colleagues in 1973, a year
after Mr. Hoover's death, when Mr. Sullivan publicly questioned Mr.
Hoover's mental acuity during his last few years in office.
"I'm no doctor,"
he said at the time in assessing Mr. Hoover. "I can't make a
judgement. But he had an unusual personality. In the last three years,
you couldn't depend upon him. He became extremely erratic."
Surviving are Mr. Sullivan's
wife, Marion, two sons, William and Andrew, both law students in Boston,
and a daughter Joanne Tuttle. A funeral service will be held on Saturday
in Hudson, Mass., Mr. Sullivan's birthplace.
(13)
G.
Robert Blakey was
interviewed by Frontline
in 1993.
Q: Did the CIA and FBI
give you access to the necessary files?
A: CIA clearly did lie
about the case. For example, Helms lied about the case. The CIA appear
to have been not cooperative, to have put out false photographs of
Oswald, to have claimed they had no photographs of Oswald, there were
many cases where they seem to have tried to cover their tracks,. How
do you know that you found the underlying cause of this? You have
to draw a distinction between the FBI and the Agency in the 1960s
- and the substantial lack of candor between them and the Warren Commission
- and the subsequent behavior of the agencies as they dealt with the
congressional committee (in 1977).
Q: Is there significance
in the fact that the military intelligence file on Oswald disappeared?
What happened? Many people would see a far more sinister significance
to the fact that the military destroyed a file of obvious historic
significance.
A: In 1972, largely as
a result of the investigations into military intelligence activities
in the United States, the Defense Department destroyed all of the
military intelligence files that they had about American citizens
and things in the United States, which was shocking from the point
of view of the committee. This general order resulted in the destruction
of historically very valuable files.
Most disturbing was the
destruction by the Army intelligence of Oswald's Army intelligence
file. The suspicion immediately was that this was part of a cover
up. We interviewed all of the officers who were responsible for the
order to destroy it, and while we have the testimony of these individuals,
we do not have the file.
Again, our ultimate conclusion
was that in the United States, more often than not, the better explanation
for government action is not hob nailed boots, but Keystone Cops.
It's incredible how our bureaucracy simply responds in a mindless
way without any regard to the historical significance of what they
have.
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