Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [212]
As the FBI well knew, Seberg was already emotionally disturbed and under psychiatric care. Soon after the publicity started, she took an overdose of sleeping tablets. The baby she was carrying was born prematurely days after the Newsweek story, but survived for only two days. The infant’s father was almost certainly neither a Black Panther nor Seberg’s estranged husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, but a Mexican she had met while making a movie.
The actress became obsessed about the loss of the baby and – when she learned of it years later – about the sinister role of the FBI. She committed suicide in 1979, almost nine years to the day after the child’s death. ‘Jean Seberg,’ said the grieving Romain Gary, ‘was destroyed by the FBI.’
None of this emerged until after Edgar was dead, and – in spite of the evidence in its files – the FBI did not admit leaking the Seberg smear to the press. Bill Thomas, then City Editor of the Los Angeles Times, said he recalled only that the story came from ‘a law enforcement source.’ Richard Held, the agent who initialed the original proposal to headquarters, went on to head the San Francisco office of the FBI. He would say only that his memo was ‘a bureaucratic requirement in response to pressure from someone in Washington.’
Edgar sent a report on Seberg to the White House, describing her as a ‘sex pervert … presently pregnant by Raymond Hewitt of the Black Panthers,’ the very day the first gossipy item appeared in the Los Angeles Times. He sent a copy of the report to the Attorney General.
Former FBI Assistant Director Charles Bates, who studied the Seberg file, had no doubt of its origin. ‘This got the okay from Washington. It was probably given to the press orally, to avoid detection. But the Director saw this – his marks are on the papers. He knew about it. There’s no excuse, and the FBI should admit it.’
Dick Gregory, the black comedian, was targeted with potentially fatal malice – on Edgar’s orders. He had three faults: He was black, he was a vociferous supporter of the civil rights movement and he had referred publicly to Edgar as ‘one of the most dangerous men in this country.’ Edgar therefore sent orders to the FBI office in Chicago, where Gregory lived, to:
develop counter-intelligence measures to neutralize him … This should not be in the nature of an expose, since he already gets far too much publicity. Instead, sophisticated completely untraceable means of neutralizing Gregory should be developed.
In some intelligence circles, ‘neutralize’ is said to be synonymous with ‘kill.’ It did not mean that at the FBI, but Edgar’s next order might well have resulted in Gregory’s death. He noted that Gregory had recently made an outspoken attack on organized crime, calling its members ‘the filthiest snakes that exist on this earth.’ And he told Marlin Johnson, the Chicago Agent in Charge, to:
Consider the use of this statement in developing a counter-intelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory’s attack …
Edgar’s order can be read only as incitement to have Gregory beaten up, perhaps killed, by the mob. Johnson, now retired, refused to say whether or not he carried out the instruction. Gregory survived.
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 Clark 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