Official and Confidential (27 page)

For Edgar, this was an opportunity for fresh persecution. Far from protecting Hayden, he forwarded his confession to the Un-American Activities Committee. The actor was summoned to testify, panicked and named many friends and colleagues who had also joined the Party. He regretted having been ‘a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover' for the rest of his life.

FBI file 100-382196 contains the lowdown on a minor Hollywood actor – ‘6'1” tall, weight 175 lbs, blue eyes and brown hair' – named Ronald Reagan. The future president, who was spending as much time on union activity as on acting, was on the board of HICCASP, the Citizens' Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions, which the FBI considered a Communist front. His brother Neil, however, was spying on HICCASP meetings for the Bureau, and warned Ronald it would be wise to resign. Instead, Ronald acted as an FBI informant too.

Soon he was phoning his brother at midnight from a pay phone at the Nutburger stand on Sunset Boulevard, to pass on information about the latest HICCASP meeting. As the Bureau's Confidential Informant, code number T-10, Reagan took to calling FBI agents to his house under cover of darkness, to tell of ‘cliques' in the Screen Actors Guild that ‘follow the Communist Party line.' He supplied the names of actors and actresses and, in an appearance arranged at Edgar's personal suggestion, did so again during a secret appearance before the Un-American Activities Committee.

Edgar investigated citizens who were not Communists and who had broken no law. Concerned about articles that, in his view, were ‘severely and unfairly discrediting our American way of life,' he was to order an FBI study to look for ‘subversive factors' in the backgrounds of prominent writers and editors. Out of a hundred people picked at random, agents identified ‘pertinent factors' that might account for the way forty of them were writing. Reports on them were turned into unlabeled blind memoranda, untraceable to the FBI, for Edgar to circulate ‘on an informal and confidential basis.'

Over the years, Edgar's literary targets would include America's most honored writers. Some, like Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and playwright Lillian Hellman, were indeed involved with Marxist causes. They were trailed, surveilled and had their mail opened. When Hammett died – a veteran of both wars – the FBI schemed to prevent his burial at Arlington Cemetery.

Numerous other famous writers had no links to Marxism but were investigated all the same. There is a 400-page file on Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck. Agents opened her mail, too, even though she did nothing more subversive than write about racism and join the ACLU.

We now know Edgar kept files on Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan and Carl Sandburg. The FBI tagged Ernest Hemingway ‘leftist' and ‘phony,' and kept a file on his wife
Mary as well. It reported on John Steinbeck, who alarmed the FBI because he ‘portrayed an extremely sordid and povertystricken side of American life,' as well as Irwin Shaw, Aldous Huxley, John O'Hara, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Rex Stout, creator of investigator Nero Wolfe, was deemed to be ‘under Communist influence,' and there was even a file on E. B. White, author of the children's classic
Charlotte's Web
.

Files were also kept on painters and sculptors, including Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore – even on Picasso, who never set foot in the United States. Great scientists were also targeted. Edgar thought Dr Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine, suspect enough to merit a four-page warning letter to the White House, because he was a member of the American-Soviet Medical Society. Salk was said to be ‘far left of center,' and had a brother in the Communist Party.

Edgar had started collecting information on Albert Einstein in 1940 because he attended pacifist meetings alongside Communists, and because he had supported the Republican cause in Spain. After the war, when the physicist realized he was being watched, he grew deeply disillusioned. ‘I came to America,' he said in 1947, ‘because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.' At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on him had grown to thousands of pages. They contain no evidence that he was ever disloyal.

The actor Charlie Chaplin, one of Einstein's friends, embodied all that triggered fear and anger in Edgar. Foreignborn, in England, he lived a rich heterosexual life, and he was a utopian ‘internationalist' who cheerfully hobnobbed with Communists. He was also one of the most famous men on earth, more famous than the Director of the FBI, and universally adored.

The Bureau had considered Chaplin dangerous even before Edgar became Director, when officials worried that his
‘Communistic' movies would infect ‘the minds of the people.' They were still worrying in 1942, when he made speeches calling on the United States to help the Soviet Union against the Nazis. Edgar's chance to persecute Chaplin, however, came when a deranged young actress, Joan Barry, claimed he was the father of her unborn child.

Edgar thought Chaplin could be prosecuted under the Mann Act (the law with which he threatened wartime agent Dusko Popov), because the actor had paid for Barry's train trips across the country. Under his personal supervision, FBI agents were soon sifting through Chaplin's financial records, interrogating friends and business colleagues and asking his servants whether the actor had ‘wild parties and naked women.'

Chaplin was cleared in the Barry case when blood tests showed he could not be the father of the child. Edgar's harassment, however, continued. He sent information about the actor to Hollywood gossip columnists, even dispatched men to the Library of Congress to hunt down a report that, a quarter of a century earlier,
Pravda
had called Chaplin ‘a Communist and a friend of humanity.'

Thousands of man-hours of research turned up nothing, but Edgar did eventually succeed in hounding Chaplin from the United States. It was his advice to the Attorney General that was to lead to the actor being banished from the country in 1952, on the grounds that he was an ‘unsavory character.' Edgar also told immigration officials of Chaplin's alleged ‘moral turpitude' and his security background – on notepaper that could not be tracked back to the FBI. References to the Bureau's use of bugging and anonymous sources were carefully deleted from the relevant reports.

Years later, long after Chaplin had settled in Switzerland, Edgar kept him on the Security Index, the list of those to be arrested in case of a national emergency. As late as 1972, when the actor was invited to Los Angeles to receive a special Oscar, Edgar was to lobby against granting him an entry visa.
Chaplin was admitted, and received a rapturous welcome. His FBI file is 1,900 pages long.

In 1975, three years after Edgar's death, a congressional committee would order a detailed check on the domestic security files of the ten largest FBI offices. This indicated that no less than 19 percent of the Bureau's total effort was still devoted to hunting ‘subversives.' Yet criminal conduct was discovered in only four out of 19,700 investigations – and none of those involved national security, espionage or terrorism.

In the fall of 1947, President Truman watched what Edgar was doing, and worried. ‘Dear Bess,' he wrote to his wife after a crisis in the Secret Service:

… I am sure glad the Secret Service is doing a better job. I was worried about that situation. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all Congressmen and Senators are afraid of him. I'm not and he knows it. If I can prevent it, there'll be no NKVD or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover's organization would make a good start towards a citizen spy system. Not for me …

Lots of love,

Harry

In 1948, an election year, the Republican Party leadership hoped to return to the White House after fifteen years in the wilderness. Edgar, who so often declared himself above politics, found a way to help them undermine the President – by stirring up new panic about the Red enemy within.

The game this time, which could not have been played without Edgar's collaboration, was to expose alleged Communists high in the Truman administration.

It started in July 1948, when a woman the press called the ‘blond spy queen' appeared before the Un-American
Activities Committee. This was Elizabeth Bentley, a plump, middle-aged former Communist whose lover, now dead, had been a known tool of the Soviets.

Bentley said she had acted as a courier from 1938 to 1944, passing sensitive information from high-level sources in Washington to superiors in the Communist underground. The high-level sources, Bentley alleged, had included a senior aide to President Roosevelt and two officials in the Truman administration, William Remington at Commerce, and Harry Dexter White, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

Four days later, before that sensation had died down, came the testimony of
Time
editor Whittaker Chambers. He too was a former Communist, and his startling claim is debated to this day.

Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a distinguished former State Department official, was also a secret Communist, one of several in a cell formed specifically to infiltrate the government. Hiss denied the charge, but Chambers produced a mass of classified documents that, he claimed, Hiss had passed to him.

Whatever the truth of the Bentley-Chambers allegations, the brutal outcome was that many lives were ruined, and four men died. White was felled by a heart attack after defending himself passionately before the committee. William Remington was bludgeoned to death in prison after being convicted of perjury. Laurence Duggan, a former State Department official smeared by Chambers, died in an unexplained fall from the sixteenth floor of a New York office building. Marvin Smith, a Justice Department attorney involved in the Hiss case, committed suicide, and Chambers himself tried to.

Alger Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury – the jury believed he lied when he said he had not passed documents to Chambers. He served three and a half years in prison and protested his innocence until his death, aged 92, in 1996.
¹

Edgar's attitude to White and Hiss had been distinctly downbeat – until it became timely to embarrass President Truman. The Director had known about the Hiss allegation as early as 1942, and had dismissed it then as ‘either history, hypothesis, or deduction.' Elizabeth Bentley's trips to Washington, supposedly to pick up secrets from traitors, had gone unchallenged for years, in spite of the fact that Jacob Golos, her lover – a long-exposed Communist operative – was a prime target for FBI surveillance.

In 1948, when White's possible guilt became a public issue, former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau asked Edgar privately whether he thought White was guilty. Morgenthau's son, the future New York District Attorney, kept his father's contemporaneous note of Edgar's response, scribbled on an old envelope. Edgar's opinion, according to the note, was that there was ‘nothing to it.'

Edgar knew, but did not mention publicly, that the key source in the entire espionage investigation, Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, had specifically said White was not one of the American traitors. Yet it was reportedly Edgar who leaked the White allegations in the first place, by feeding information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He did so through his aide Lou Nichols, a man so adept at passing information for Edgar that he became known as ‘the cleanest leak in Washington.'

Alger Hiss was sent to jail on the basis of only one piece of hard evidence: a Woodstock typewriter said to produce type that matched both the copies of official documents produced by Chambers and letters known to have been typed on the Hiss family typewriter. Hiss, backed by some of the expert witnesses, claimed the machine was doctored specifically in order to frame him.

We may never know whether Edgar did stoop to such tactics to set up an innocent man. But documents now available show that, in 1960, he was open to the notion of using forgery to neutralize a Communist Party member by
‘exposing' him to colleagues, fraudulently, as an FBI informer. His only admonition to his agents was to make certain the deception ‘insures success and avoids embarrassment to the Bureau.'

Told that the scheme involved typewriter forgery, Edgar raised only a mild objection, but not to the idea itself. ‘To alter a typewriter to match a known model,' he advised, ‘would take a large amount of typewriter specimens and weeks of laboratory work.'

Whether the FBI framed Hiss or not, it is clear that milking the affair for political purposes meant more to Edgar than seeing justice done. He had been working covertly to leak the accusations as early as 1945, long before Chambers went public. The word was spread first by William Sullivan, then one of Edgar's favored officials, in briefings to a right-wing Catholic priest, Father John Cronin.

Sullivan, significantly, was the man to whom Edgar would one day entrust COINTELPRO, a program specifically designed to discredit and harass targeted groups by all means available, including forgery of documents.
²

Father Cronin, for his part, reportedly passed on the Hiss allegations, first in a report to America's Catholic bishops, and, in 1947, to Congressman Richard Nixon. Nixon said in a recent interview that ‘the FBI and Hoover played no role whatsoever in the Hiss case thing. Hoover was loyal to Truman … There was no way that he was going to have his boys running about helping the Committee.'

According to Father Cronin, however, Nixon got constant feedback, thanks to FBI agent Ed Hummer. Hummer ‘would call me every day,' Cronin recalled. ‘I told Dick [Nixon], who then knew where to look for things …' The FBI file, meanwhile, confirms out of Nixon's own mouth what he denied forty years later. In December 1948, at a secret meeting in his hotel room, he told agents he had ‘worked very closely with the Bureau and with Mr Nichols during the last year' on the Hiss case.