Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [94]
Sullivan, significantly, was the man to whom Edgar would one day entrust COINTELPRO, a program specifically designed to discredit and harass targeted groups by all means available, including forgery of documents.2
Father Cronin, for his part, reportedly passed on the Hiss allegations, first in a report to America’s Catholic bishops, and, in 1947, to Congressman Richard Nixon. Nixon said in a recent interview that ‘the FBI and Hoover played no role whatsoever in the Hiss case thing. Hoover was loyal to Truman … There was no way that he was going to have his boys running about helping the Committee.’
According to Father Cronin, however, Nixon got constant feedback, thanks to FBI agent Ed Hummer. Hummer ‘would call me every day,’ Cronin recalled. ‘I told Dick [Nixon], who then knew where to look for things …’ The FBI file, meanwhile, confirms out of Nixon’s own mouth what he denied forty years later. In December 1948, at a secret meeting in his hotel room, he told agents he had ‘worked very closely with the Bureau and with Mr Nichols during the last year’ on the Hiss case.
Long before the Hiss case, Nichols had become a familiar face in the office of another Republican member of the Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Karl Mundt of South Dakota.3 Mundt was also close to Edgar. ‘They had private dinners together,’ his former assistant Robert McGaughey recalled, ‘and they belonged to the same poker club. The Senator always said to me, “If there’s anything you want brought up, we’ll discuss it over the game tonight.”’4
Edgar fed Mundt information on Hiss from 1945 onward, McGaughey revealed. During the intense 1948 phase, he said, ‘Nichols was up in the office, say, twice a day … There was a lot of exchange of suggestions, coming from Mr Hoover more than from Mr Mundt, letting us know where to look for information.’
Was Mundt given access to FBI files? ‘Files? Yeah,’ said McGaughey. ‘Let’s put it this way. He had access to see information that was in the files Mr Hoover had. This was a personal relationship.’
Edgar found a way to cover himself. If a politician asked to see an FBI file, he would promptly write denying access. McGaughey revealed, however, that the agent who handcarried the negative reply to Capitol Hill would simultaneously pass on the information requested, sometimes verbally, sometimes typed on plain, untraceable paper. The file copy of the denial, meanwhile, would be preserved at headquarters, ‘proof’ that the request had been turned down. Other evidence of connivance with conservative politicians was simply destroyed.
From post-Communist Moscow, and from previously unavailable US intelligence files, has come conflicting information. Over the past half-dozen years, some academics – mostly American – have said their analysis of all the evidence convinced them of Hiss’ guilt. By contrast, over the past two decades, others – not only former Soviet intelligence officials but US historians – have insisted that the evidence thus far unearthed does no such thing. At a 2007 symposium, two writers postulated – based on the known movements of American officials – that another diplomat named Wilder Foote, not Hiss, had been the spy.
President Truman, who never believed Hiss was guilty, had no doubt as to what the case had really been about. ‘What they were trying to do, all those birds,’ Truman was to say years later, ‘they were trying to get the Democrats. They were trying to get me out of the White House, and they were willing to go to any lengths to do it. [The Republicans] had been out of office a long time, and they’d done everything to get back in. They did do just about anything they could think of, all that witch-hunting … The Constitution has never been in such danger …’
For all the scare-mongering, only four American Communists would be convicted of espionage offenses while Edgar was Director of the FBI.5
Edgar’s priority in 1948 was to secure his power