Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [114]
According to Bernard Spindel, an electronics specialist, FBI bugging of Capitol Hill was routine in the mid-sixties. In 1965, while checking a congressman’s phone, he found a bugging device wired into Congress’ telephone frame room. Then, using a detector, he tracked a multi-line Alpeth cable that was spliced into the one serving both houses of Congress and their hearing rooms. The cable terminated at the old Esso Building at 261 Constitution Avenue, in a room rented by the Justice Department.
‘I was able to monitor senators’ and congressmen’s conversations on that cable,’ recalled Spindel’s partner Earl Jaycox, ‘and it was one that shouldn’t have been carrying their calls. We understood from our conversations with telephone company employees that the cable had been put in at the direction of the FBI.’3
Spindel was to have testified about all this to the Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy, chaired by Senator Edward Long, the Democratic senator from Missouri. Then, on the eve of the hearing, he was told Senator Long had reached an ‘understanding’ with the FBI, that he was not to discuss FBI operations on the stand. When Spindel tried to do so anyway, Long silenced him. ‘We will not,’ he said, ‘go into this area.’ The reason, according to Long’s Chief Counsel Bernard Fensterwald, was that the Senator had been blackmailed into submission by the FBI.
For eight years in the sixties, Long did battle with what he called ‘the snooping monster,’ the invasion of citizens’ privacy by the tappers, microphone planters and mail openers of modern life. He also wanted something that was then just a pious hope, a Freedom of Information Act to give citizens access to government records.
In 1963, as chairman of a judiciary subcommittee, Long began to probe government efficiency. Fired by the discovery that state agencies spent $20 million on eavesdropping equipment each year, he ordered an inquiry. The resulting hearings ground on for more than three years, and spelled the Senator’s ruin.
When Long decided to hold hearings specifically on the FBI, Edgar was furious. ‘Pressure,’ an aide had earlier advised, ‘would have to be applied so that the personal interest of Senator Long became involved, rather than any ideological basis.’ Years later, in a sworn affidavit, Fensterwald gave this account of what followed in 1966.
‘The FBI,’ Fensterwald said, ‘knew they were going to be the next subject of the committee hearings. Hoover’s man [Assistant Director] Cartha DeLoach made an appointment and came to Long’s office with another agent. They never come alone. Long had me sit in on it, probably because he expected it to be about our FBI investigation. I doubt that he knew it was going to be “This Is Your Life, Senator Long.” They had a file folder with them, and DeLoach said something like, “Senator, I think you ought to read this file that we have on you. You know we would never use it, because you’re a friend of ours, but you never know what unscrupulous people will do. And we just thought you ought to know the type of stuff that might get around and might be harmful to you.”’
‘They handed him the folder, a fairly thin one, as I recall. And Long just sat there and read it for a few minutes. Then he closed the file, he thanked them and they went on their way. The next thing I knew we had orders to skip over the FBI inquiries and go on to whatever other agency was next. I think there were some perfunctory face-saving hearings, but we never got into the heavy stuff – the wire-tapping and so on.’
DeLoach, who has denied the Fensterwald allegation, was Edgar’s principal go-between