Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [92]
Edgar thought Chaplin could be prosecuted under the Mann Act (the law with which he threatened wartime agent Dusko Popov), because the actor had paid for Barry’s train trips across the country. Under his personal supervision, FBI agents were soon sifting through Chaplin’s financial records, interrogating friends and business colleagues and asking his servants whether the actor had ‘wild parties and naked women.’
Chaplin was cleared in the Barry case when blood tests showed he could not be the father of the child. Edgar’s harassment, however, continued. He sent information about the actor to Hollywood gossip columnists, even dispatched men to the Library of Congress to hunt down a report that, a quarter of a century earlier, Pravda had called Chaplin ‘a Communist and a friend of humanity.’
Thousands of man-hours of research turned up nothing, but Edgar did eventually succeed in hounding Chaplin from the United States. It was his advice to the Attorney General that was to lead to the actor being banished from the country in 1952, on the grounds that he was an ‘unsavory character.’ Edgar also told immigration officials of Chaplin’s alleged ‘moral turpitude’ and his security background – on notepaper that could not be tracked back to the FBI. References to the Bureau’s use of bugging and anonymous sources were carefully deleted from the relevant reports.
Years later, long after Chaplin had settled in Switzerland, Edgar kept him on the Security Index, the list of those to be arrested in case of a national emergency. As late as 1972, when the actor was invited to Los Angeles to receive a special Oscar, Edgar was to lobby against granting him an entry visa. Chaplin was admitted, and received a rapturous welcome. His FBI file is 1,900 pages long.
In 1975, three years after Edgar’s death, a congressional committee would order a detailed check on the domestic security files of the ten largest FBI offices. This indicated that no less than 19 percent of the Bureau’s total effort was still devoted to hunting ‘subversives.’ Yet criminal conduct was discovered in only four out of 19,700 investigations – and none of those involved national security, espionage or terrorism.
In the fall of 1947, President Truman watched what Edgar was doing, and worried. ‘Dear Bess,’ he wrote to his wife after a crisis in the Secret Service:
… I am sure glad the Secret Service is doing a better job. I was worried about that situation. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all Congressmen and Senators are afraid of him. I’m not and he knows it. If I can prevent it, there’ll be no NKVD or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start towards a citizen spy system. Not for me …
Lots of love,
Harry
In 1948, an election year, the Republican Party leadership hoped to return to the White House after fifteen years in the wilderness. Edgar, who so often declared himself above politics, found a way to help them undermine the President – by stirring up new panic about the Red enemy within.
The game this time, which could not have been played without Edgar’s collaboration, was to expose alleged Communists high in the Truman administration.
It started in July 1948, when a woman the press called the ‘blond spy queen’ appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee. This was Elizabeth Bentley, a plump, middle-aged former Communist whose lover, now dead, had been a known tool of the Soviets.
Bentley said she had acted as a courier from 1938 to 1944, passing sensitive information from high-level sources in Washington to superiors in the Communist underground. The high-level sources, Bentley alleged, had included a senior aide to President Roosevelt and two officials in the Truman administration, William Remington