Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [64]
In the spring of 1940, convinced that wiretapping was vital to national security, President Roosevelt overrode the law. He authorized the Attorney General to permit eavesdropping on ‘persons suspected of subversive activities against the United States, including suspected spies …’ This order, Francis Biddle pointed out long afterward, ‘opened the door pretty wide to wiretapping of anyone suspected of subversive activities [Biddle’s emphasis].’ It was to remain Edgar’s basic authority for telephone tapping for a quarter of a century.
Attorney General Robert Jackson was so unhappy about this development that he distanced himself from the issue and let Edgar decide who should be wiretapped. Evidence of the sort of bugging Edgar would approve came less than a year later.
Harry Bridges, the thirty-five-year-old leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, had long been a thorn in the side of management. He was also an irritant to Edgar personally. Five years earlier, when Edgar had briefed Roosevelt on the internal threat from Communists, he had named Bridges as the man who could paralyze the nation’s shipping. Even after the union leader came out in favor of a peace agreement with management, Edgar pursued him relentlessly.
Bridges was vulnerable because he had been born in Australia. Edgar claimed he was a Communist, and foreignborn Communists could be deported for membership in ‘an organization advocating the violent overthrow of the government.’ Bridges said he had never joined the Party, though he admitted being an admirer of ‘the Soviet workers’ state.’ The result of his latest deportation hearing was still pending in the summer of 1941.
That August, Leon Goodelman, a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, received a call from the secretary of the Citizens’ Committee for Harry Bridges. Bridges, he was told, was currently staying at the Edison Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street. He had discovered his telephone was being tapped, and invited the reporter to come and see for himself.
Goodelman found he had a scoop on his hands. Bridges explained he had been staying at the Edison intermittently since early July. He was accustomed to being surveilled by the FBI and became suspicious when, even though he asked for different accommodation, the hotel persisted in giving him one particular room, number 1027. Then, down in the hotel lobby, Bridges spotted an FBI agent who had attended one of his deportation hearings. After identifying two more agents, Bridges decided to experiment. Using the telephone in his room, he called a union colleague to make an appointment at a nearby drugstore. Sure enough, one of the FBI agents turned up at the rendezvous. If they knew about his appointment, Bridges reasoned, then they were listening to his calls.
‘I went back to the hotel,’ he recalled, ‘went in my door very fast and dove over to the connecting door, lay down and looked under it into the next room. Two pairs of feet went by my eye and I could see some bunched-up telephone wire on the floor … After tipping off my friends that I was being tapped, I sort of settled down to have some fun with the FBI. I left the room very quietly, and ducked out of the hotel.’
Soon, armed with a pair of binoculars, Bridges was watching his room, and the room next door to it, from the roof garden of the hotel across the street. ‘There were the two guys,’ he said, ‘stretched out on the twin beds with their earphones on, thinking I was still in the room.’ First with colleagues, then with reporter Goodelman and a photographer, the union leader watched his watchers for days. Whenever Bridges left his room, the journalists noticed, one of the agents next door would sit down to work at a typewriter. He was