Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [213]
Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt, a former Panther leader in California, spent twenty-seven years in jail for the alleged murder of a woman during a robbery. As revealed on CBS’s 60 Minutes, however, the FBI concealed the fact that key testimony at his trial was provided by a Bureau informant. Pratt’s conviction was overturned in 1997. He was freed, but his life had been ruined.
Edgar, it is known, had personally ordered that a way be found to put Pratt out of circulation. He was fully briefed on all Bureau operations against the Panthers, and ensured that they were among the most closely held secrets in FBI history.
From the standpoint of the Nixon White House, Edgar did not do enough to counter radical movements. In 1969 and early 1970, bombings or bomb threats were running at eighty every day. There were 400 threats on one day alone in New York City. Blasts ripped through the Manhattan offices of IBM, General Telephone and Mobil Oil. Forty-three people were killed, and property worth $21 million destroyed.
It was, President Nixon recalled, a ‘season of mindless terror.’ Few were caught and, of 40,000 incidents, 64 percent were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown. The men around Nixon had grumbled from the start about the paucity of FBI intelligence on things that really mattered – as distinct from dirt on people’s private lives. There were other things, however, that seemed intolerable in the present situation.
Relations between the FBI and the other intelligence agencies were at an all-time low. Edgar had been hostile and uncooperative toward the CIA since the forties, when he had been thwarted in his desire to do its work himself. Yet while he rarely deigned to meet with Directors of the CIA, his agents had long found ways to cooperate with the Agency. In the spring of 1970, however, in a fit of pique over a trifling formality, Edgar ordered all liaison to cease. In a city where there is rarely unanimity on anything, the news shocked everyone in the secret world.
Edgar’s veteran liaison with the CIA, Sam Papich, was so appalled that he tendered his resignation. ‘I hope you will share my alarm,’ he wrote Edgar. ‘I am absolutely convinced that the intelligence services of Great Britain, France, West Germany and others are well penetrated by the Soviets … The break in relations between the FBI and CIA will provide a basis for promoting further rifts … I appeal to you to leave the door open.’
Edgar was not listening. He was shortly to sever the FBI’s links with the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military services and the Secret Service – with everyone, indeed, except the White House.
As old men isolate themselves, so Edgar was trying to isolate the FBI. Nixon’s aides thought the situation the height of folly, especially at a time of crisis. They were frustrated, too, to discover that agents were now inhibited in their ability to perform ‘black-bag’ jobs – Bureauspeak for illegal break-ins. Edgar had smiled on such operations for decades, only to call a halt in 1966, when Bureau methods came under unprecedented scrutiny. This formal order had been a device to protect Edgar’s rear, not some sudden rush of respect for the proprieties. And black-bag work had continued, though more cautiously. The young men around Nixon, however, had no time for an old man’s caution.
In April 1970, H. R. Haldeman went to the President with complaints about Edgar and suggestions for change. Nixon listened, and ordered the nation’s intelligence chiefs to conduct a rapid review of the security situation