Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [61]
The FBI later discovered that Bennett had purchased many of the Communist names in his files from Gerald Smith, the local Fascist leader. This did nothing to dampen Edgar’s enthusiasm for him.
In late 1939, without seeking higher authority, Edgar boldly ordered his staff to prepare dossiers for a Custodial Detention List, an index of people who could be detained in time of war. The list named not only those who sympathized with Germany and its allies, but also those with ‘Communist sympathies.’ It included, too, people who had done nothing to deserve suspicion, like Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times.
In 1942, on his way to a foreign assignment, Salisbury had problems obtaining a passport. It was not until forty years later, when he obtained his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, that he found out why. An eccentric female neighbor had told the authorities that Salisbury was an ‘employee of the German government.’ He was a code expert, she believed, because he had recording devices at his home. Salisbury’s house was secretly searched and a file opened on him at the FBI. It was this that caused the passport problem. Salisbury’s name went onto the Custodial Detention List, marked: ‘Pro-German – stated he is in employ of German government.’ Salisbury remained technically liable to arrest and internment, in the event of a national emergency, until 1971.
Edgar would resist bitterly when, in 1940, Attorney General Jackson insisted that the Justice Department – rather than the FBI – assume overall control of the Detention List. The Director found a way not to comply in 1943, when Attorney General Biddle ruled that the Department existed to pursue law-breakers, that it had no business cataloguing citizens according to their alleged ‘dangerousness,’ and directed that the Detention List be abolished. Edgar simply ordered his officials to maintain the list, but to call it the Security Index instead. He did this secretly, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered in 1975, without informing Biddle, who was his boss.
In public, most attorneys general talked as though their relations with Edgar were good. In private, there was often terrific friction. Frank Murphy, a future Supreme Court Justice, who held the office in 1939, would conclude that Edgar had ambitions to become Attorney General himself. He found the Director’s behavior alarming. ‘He is almost pathological,’ Murphy told Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell. ‘He can get something on anybody if he starts investigating him; that is his tendency.’
Indeed, Edgar kept a file on Murphy himself, one that contained information on his private life, and which stayed open until he died. Parts of the file remained withheld during research for this book.
In June 1939, with war looming in Europe, President Roosevelt agreed that the FBI – with the War and Navy departments – should take over all intelligence operations. In September, as Hitler signed a nonaggression treaty with Stalin and prepared to invade Poland, the President announced publicly that Edgar was to head the fight against foreign espionage and sabotage. At the same time, he authorized him to gather information on ‘subversive activities.’ The orders were vague and designed to respond to a temporary need. Their effect, however, was to give Edgar the nearest thing he would ever have to a charter to conduct domestic intelligence – one he would fall back on for the rest of his career.
Edgar’s first use of the new authority caused a storm of protest. In January the arrests of a number of anti-Semitic agitators, on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, ended in fiasco. It emerged that the men had received their inspiration and their weapons from a paid FBI informant, and all charges were dropped.
Then FBI agents in Detroit and Milwaukee seized