Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [252]
Chapter 32
1. The Democratic Convention in Chicago turned out to be a week of mayhem in which hundreds of anti-Vietnam demonstrators were injured in battles with the police. Edgar praised the police and said the media had distorted the facts. Later, a presidential commission concluded the police behavior had been gratuitous and malicious, ‘a police riot.’ A Senate probe showed Edgar had urged agents to look not for the facts but for information that would weigh in favor of the police. (IC 6, p. 254, NYT, Sept. 19, Dec. 2, 1968.)
2. Rose Mary Woods’ brother Joseph was a retired FBI agent. He was one of those who fed Hoover derogatory information on politicians and later – according to one reporter – tried to spread smear material on Martin Luther King. (See index references.)
3. There was a Hearthside restaurant, and there was such a reservoir. In 1988, Billy Byars, Jr., remembered the two adolescents named by Krebs and agreed that one of them had visited the Del Charro. While he said he knew nothing of the alleged sex activity, three of Krebs’ associates recalled hearing elements of the story at the time.
Chapter 33
1. Hoover had declared himself ‘extremely pleased’ with the sending of a phony letter smearing a New York Communist Party worker, William Albertson, as an FBI informant. His widow was paid $170,000 as late as 1989, as compensation for the fact that the operation wrecked Albertson’s career. Hoover personally supervised the thirty-year persecution of Frank Wilkinson, a Los Angeles housing official who had first come to the FBI’s attention for leading protests against plans for segregated housing in 1942. For no offense other than a stubborn commitment to civil rights and the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Wilkinson was surveilled, his phone tapped and his office burgled. Propaganda against him was mailed from nonexistent organizations, and his meetings were disrupted – on one occasion by American Nazis acting at the instigation of FBI agents. The FBI once learned precise details of a plot to kill Wilkinson and failed to warn him. Hoover’s notes and initials are all over the Wilkinson file, which runs to 132,000 pages. (NYT, Oct. 26, 1989, People, Nov. 20, 1989, [Wilkinson] files of LAT, esp. Oct. 18, 1987, int. Frank Wilkinson, 1989, parts of FBI 100–112434, It Did Happen Here, by Bud and Ruth Schulz, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 263, and Athan Theoharis, Secret Files, p. 129.)
2. There was evidence that the FBI triggered events that led to other Panther deaths. In New Haven, Connecticut, Alex Rackley was executed by his own comrades following the leak of false information that he was a government informant. (In These Times, May 9, 1990.)
Chapter 34
1. See Chapter 9.
2. See Chapter 21.
3. See Chapter 20.
4. Mitchell said nothing about a resignation offer in eight hours of conversation with Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup, before his death in 1988. (Int. Len Colodny, 1991.)
Chapter 36
1. The Soviet KGB, for its part, chalked up numerous confirmed kills with the use of poisoning techniques. (KGB, by John Barron, NY, Bantam, 1974, pp. 423ff).
2. The FBI claimed in 1991 it had nothing on this subject in its files. Then, confronted with a memo from Prosecution Force files, it produced a document reflecting Akerman’s inquiry arid establishing that his source was independent of the Crimson article. Its author, former Agent Forrest Putman, said he could not remember writing the report. (John Wright [FBI] to James Lesar, Feb. 17, 1989, Kevin O’Brien [FBI] to Lesar, Nov. 20, 1991, Forrest Putman to CENSORED, Nov. 26, 1973, FBI 62–115870, int. Putman, 1991.)
3. According to the Crimson article, DeDiego suggested that two Cubans, Humberto Lopez and Jaime Ferrer, might supply information on the break-ins. Lopez, who was a Hunt-Liddy operative,