Official and Confidential (35 page)

Life
reporter Sandy Smith, who obtained the ‘transcript' in 1968, had made his name as an organized-crime specialist while working for the
Chicago Tribune
, a paper especially favored by the FBI. In 1965, when
Playboy
consulted Smith about an article by a former agent critical of the FBI, he recommended it be rejected and passed it on to the Bureau. Bureau documents describe Smith's value to the FBI as ‘inestimable' and say he was ‘utilized on many occasions.'
⁶

While Smith refused to comment on that, former
Life
reporter Bill Lambert, who also worked on the Gallagher story, recalled that his colleague was so close to the FBI that he was ‘almost like an agent.' It was possible, he agreed, that someone at the FBI might have fed him a phony transcript. Former Assistant Director DeLoach, for his part, admitted he knew Smith well in 1968, but had no comment on the
Life
story. ‘I do not,' he claimed, ‘recall the Neil Gallagher matter.'

Another key figure in the story, however, did remember. In 1986, when Roy Cohn knew he was dying, he was told that Gallagher's wife was still tormented by the allegation about O'Brien, the gambler who had supposedly died in her arms. Cohn then countersigned a formal letter stating that the O'Brien allegation had come from DeLoach. He quoted DeLoach as saying that if Congressman Gallagher ‘did not stop his hearings on evasion [
sic
] of privacy, he would make the information public.' Cohn passed on the threat, he now confessed, just as Gallagher had claimed.

In 1992, still a popular figure in New Jersey, Gallagher turned seventy-one. A measure of his confidence in his innocence was that he agreed to give the author free rein with any documents on him the FBI might release under the Freedom of Information Act. More than four years after applying, not one document was forthcoming.

Mitchell Rogovin, who was an Assistant Attorney General at the time of the expose, spoke of ‘all the leaking to
Life
magazine' by the Bureau in those days. It was, he said, ‘part and parcel of the retributive mode that went on … This was one of a lot of cases …'

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark expressed grave concern about the Gallagher case and that of Senator Long. The leaking of unproven information to the press, he said, was ‘inexcusable.' ‘This,' he had sighed at the height of the crisis, ‘is the work of the old man down the hall.'

This was the dark side of Edgar, the most insidious violation of his office. Most Americans saw only the other side, the formidable propaganda machine and the impressive corps of agents.

‘J. Edgar Hoover,'
Newsweek
declared in 1957, ‘has become as bipartisan as the Washington Monument, as much an institution as the Smithsonian.'

21

‘The FBI is a closely knit, cooperative organization of more than 14,000 men and women. I like to speak of it as a “we” organization.'

J. Edgar Hoover, 1956

O
ne day in 1959, as the lights came up in a screening room at FBI headquarters, Edgar was observed to be weeping. He had just watched a preview of Hollywood's movie
The FBI Story
, and he was crying with happiness. He thought the film, which portrayed a super-efficient agency staffed by a happy band of exemplary agents, ‘one of the greatest jobs I've ever seen.'

In his address to the Appropriations Committee that year, Edgar catalogued a battery of impressive facts. The Identification Division now held more than 150 million fingerprints on file, and most of those submitted by police had been successfully identified. The Laboratory had made 165,000 scientific examinations, an all-time high. FBI investigative staff had performed more than three million hours of overtime. The FBI National Academy had celebrated twenty-three years of training law enforcement officers. Three and a half thousand agents, along with 10,000 other Bureau employees, had as usual achieved a near-perfect conviction rate. Chairman Rooney thanked the ‘eminent Director,' and dismissed him after perfunctory questioning.

Within the FBI, a generation of agents was beginning to ask questions. The structure of the organization had not changed since the reshuffle of 1924, but there were now two
FBIs. There was the Field, with its corps of brave, hardworking agents serving in the front line against crime; and there was FBI Headquarters – the Seat of Government, as Edgar liked to call it – with its ever-expanding bureaucracy made up of men who had been office-bound for years. Communication within the Field was becoming a sterile business. Many active agents thought of headquarters as a place for timeservers and promotion-hunters, a source of meaningless paperwork and fatuous orders.

British MI-5 officer Peter Wright, at the FBI on a liaison visit, thought the Seat of Government a ‘magnificent triumphalist museum' peopled by vacant-looking staff. At a meeting with Edgar and two Assistant Directors, he was shocked to see how the aides ‘for all outward toughness and the seniority of their positions … were cowed.'

Fear was woven into the fabric of FBI life. Edgar punished Acting Assistant Director Howard Fletcher, who had tried to change an unfair wages system, by excluding him from promotion. Bernard Brown, Assistant Agent in Charge in New York, was demoted and transferred to the boondocks for commenting to a journalist without permission. One man – his name is deleted from the FBI release – was reported for telling a risqué joke to a class at the FBI Academy. ‘I regret very much having told such a story,' he told Edgar in a groveling letter. ‘I want to assure you, as I did Mr Tolson, that I do not consider myself a jokester … I have, of course, learned my lesson.'

The myth of the infallible Director had been institutionalized. ‘Boys,' an instructor told a group of rookie recruits, ‘J. Edgar Hoover is an inspiration to us all. Indeed, it has been said, and truly, “The sunshine of his presence lights our way.”' Lectures to recruits were approved in advance by Edgar and his aides.

The first test for new agents came at the end of the training course, when they filed into the presence to shake Edgar's hand. As they waited in the anteroom, men were seen frantically
wiping their hands on their pants. A moist palm was enough to end an agent's career before it began. So were pimples or a bald head.

Once, as a group of recruits left his office, Edgar summoned the instructor back. ‘One of them,' he snapped, ‘is a pinhead. Get rid of him!' Afraid to ask which man Edgar meant, the instructor surreptitiously checked his pupils' hat sizes. There were three men with small heads, all of them size 67/8. To placate Edgar, and to protect Training Division officials, all three were fired.

‘In our class,' said former agent Jack Shaw, ‘we had a kid from Kansas called Leroy, who'd been a schoolteacher. He had a high-pitched voice, and this didn't fit with the Bureau stereotype: tall, commanding, blond, blue-eyed, the perfect accent. Word came down about this, so they worked on Leroy to lower his voice. He got it to a manly level, and he was smart and sharp in every other way. But when he went for his final test, the Assistant Director looked at him and said, “Have your ears always protruded like that?” Leroy had large, flapping ears, and they told him his ears were wrong. He left that day.'

An agent who lost his gas credit card received a letter of reprimand from Edgar. Agent Francis Flanagan was talking on the phone one day, hat on and cigarette in mouth while trying to keep a key informant on the line, when Edgar walked in. His punishment, for failing to spring to his feet, was an immediate transfer to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

During the fifties, word reached headquarters from San Francisco that a nude belly dancer had performed at an agent's retirement party. Edgar ordered all 200 partygoers to file a report, but not one admitted having seen the dancer. Each claimed he had been in the men's room during the performance. For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar's wrath was thwarted.

In the sixties, a clerk called Thomas Carter would be subjected to an inquisition because of an anonymous letter
claiming he had slept with a young woman. Carter admitted spending the night with the woman, who was his fiancée, but insisted he had done so ‘clothed in Bermudas and a sports shirt.' One of his roommates was then asked if he had heard the bed creaking. He had not, but Edgar fired Carter anyway. Carter sued, arguing unfair dismissal, and the courts decided in his favor.

Grown men tolerated such nonsense because an agent's job had great advantages. It was well paid, sometimes exciting, and there was the prospect of retirement after twenty years, a decent pension and a second career based on the FBI background.

There was also safety in numbers. It was an unlucky man who attracted the full blast of Edgar's wrath or who suffered under the worst of his centurions. In offices far away from the throne, agents found ways to function as well as the system would permit – and at its best it was very good indeed. As in the Army, men put up with the sillier rules, kept their noses clean and got on with the job.

Yet the rules seem to have become increasingly absurd. Field agents, for example, had to spend a minimum number of hours out of the office, even when there was nothing to do. This was obligatory at times when the headquarters' inspection team was expected. ‘Stay out of the office,' one official told his men. ‘If you've seen all the movies, then go to the library or someplace … The main thing is to stay out of here.'

‘Since we weren't allowed to drink coffee in the office except before 8:15
A.M
.,' former agent Jack Shaw recalled, ‘agents used to go down to Casey's Kitchen on Sixty-seventh Street. John Malone, the Assistant Director in Charge, would position himself in the lobby of the office to catch them coming back. He was infamous for shouting, “Hey, you there!” as an agent came in through the swing door. Sometimes the agent would turn right around and go out again, with Malone chasing him out into the street, yelling.'

Word sometimes reached the agents at Casey's that ‘Cementhead' Malone, one of Edgar's closest associates, was on his way to flush them out. ‘Seventeen or eighteen guys would abandon their breakfasts and clear out through the fire escape, rushing pell-mell, brushing pedestrians aside.'

For the agent and his family packed off to the other end of the nation for some trivial transgression, there was nothing to laugh about. ‘The worst thing,' said a former Agent in Charge who suffered such punishment, ‘is what happens to you in the eyes of your family. “You must have done something wrong or Mr Hoover wouldn't have demoted you,” they say. You can't ever explain it, even in your own family. You lose faith in yourself. The things that used to be true aren't true anymore. I don't think Mr Hoover really understood this phase of his disciplinary actions, because he never had a family – wife and kids, I mean.'

The massive file on Agent Nelson Gibbons, who served from 1954 to 1962, is a catalogue of calculated cruelty. Gibbons came to the FBI after war service in the Marines and a spell on the police force. He proved an outstanding agent, attracting six commendations and for years no censures at all – a state of grace achieved by few. He was brave in action against armed criminals and won praise from Edgar for unmasking a Soviet spy. Gibbons became a Resident Agent, running a small FBI office on his own, at the age of thirty-three.

His troubles began only in 1958, when – at sixty-three – Edgar began worrying excessively about his health. There was nothing significantly wrong, but, not least judging from the bewildering number of doctors he consulted, he had become something of a hypochondriac. That year Edgar read an insurance company prospectus that listed ideal weights in proportion to height. It told him he was overweight, and, according to the FBI press office, he went on a diet that brought his weight down from 203 pounds to 170.

What the Director did for his health, agents were expected
to do, too. Agents in Charge were charged with monitoring the weight of every man in the Bureau. As a health precaution, properly administered, the idea had merit. As an iron rule, rigidly enforced under pain of punishment, it was a disaster.

It was certainly that for Agent Gibbons, a thickset fellow, nearly six feet tall, who usually weighed more than 190 pounds. He weighed in at 195 when Edgar's checks started, and the examiner recommended he lose seven pounds. Gibbons tried hard to conform, even though his own doctor thought his weight reasonable given his size. The agent duly lost seven pounds, but then his weight began straying up into the low 190s again. That was not good enough for headquarters.

In 1960, after being turned down for promotion because of the weight issue, Gibbons made a declaration of independence. He said he was happy with his weight at 190 and asked to see Edgar – a right theoretically extended to all agents. Edgar refused, ordering Gibbons to be transferred to Detroit and weighed every thirty days.

Gibbons was now on the Bureau ‘bicycle.' Soon he was moved again, to Mobile, Alabama, then – two months later – to Oklahoma City. There he was twice censured and suspended without pay. Yet senior officials reported he had ‘no surplus fat,' and he continued to work out at the YMCA. For all the abuse, he said he wanted to go on working for ‘the best organization in the world.'

Unimpressed, Edgar condemned Gibbons for not being a ‘team worker' and transferred him again – to Butte, Montana. Then again, to Anchorage, Alaska, where petty punishment continued. At last, after a fatuous interrogation as to whether and how often he might have gotten drunk while in the Marines, long before he joined the FBI, Gibbons cracked. He quit his post and cabled Edgar, saying he felt ‘mentally unable' to continue.

Though Gibbons never suffered mental illness, before or
after this ordeal, the FBI found a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as ‘paranoid.' He was retired on a disability pension, an event Edgar perceived as some kind of victory. ‘Good riddance,' he scrawled on a final memo, ‘of bad rubbish.'