The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11, edited by Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman. University of California Press, 376 pages, $29.95
Ever since FBI Director James Comey staggered into the spotlight during last year's presidential campaign, critics have been comparing him to the most infamous man ever to hold Comey's job. "I think this is sort of a flashback to the days of J. Edgar Hoover," the journalist turned academic Sanford Ungar told The New York Times last October. "I don't mean to smear Comey, and it may be an unfair comparison. But Hoover would weigh in on issues without warning or expectation."
Comey's comments about the Hillary Clinton email investigation do highlight how a law enforcement agency can improperly influence public opinion. But there are some pretty big differences between his behavior and that of his predecessor. For one thing, his actions last year were public, a fact that triggered a national debate over their propriety and eventually led the Justice Department's inspector general to launch an investigation of how his agency handled its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails. For another, that probe was a legitimate criminal investigation.
Hoover's FBI, by contrast, secretly monitored the non-criminal personal and political conduct of U.S. citizens. Among them: first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop. Hoover even ordered his agents to conduct a content analysis of Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo to ascertain whether one of the strip's animal characters, based on the FBI director, portrayed him in a positive or derogatory light.
The information acquired in these surveillance expeditions was maintained in closed FBI files, and much of it was used to advance Hoover's political agenda through leaks to favored reporters, governors, members of Congress, and the White House—on the strict condition that the recipient not disclose the FBI's assistance.
The scope of Hoover's abuses did not become widely known until the unprecedented hearings conducted by the so-called Church Committee in 1975–76. It has been advanced since then through a mixture of journalism, scholarship, and Freedom of Information Act requests. Now a new book, edited by Sylvester Johnson of Northwestern University and Steven Weitzman of the University of Pennsylvania, adds another dimension to our understanding by recounting the bureau's long history involving religious activists and institutions.
The FBI and Religion contains 15 essays written by theologians, historians, and political scientists; the ground it covers stretches from the bureau's birth during the Progressive Era through the current war on terror. It is based on extensive reading of the secondary literature on the FBI, supplemented at times by research of relevant and accessible FBI records. Most of the chapters focus on the government's surveillance of religious leaders and institutions, with bureau officials often equating moral advocacy of peace or racial justice with threats to the nation's security. Targets include the Church of God in Christ during World War I, the Moorish Science Temple of America from the 1920s through the 1960s, the Nation of Islam and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1950s and '60s, the Branch Davidians during the Waco siege of 1993, and militant Muslims following 9/11.
Other essays assess how, during Hoover's tenure, FBI officials employed religious rhetoric to influence public attitudes about suspected subversives. (Hoover himself regularly used religious rhetoric in his public speeches and writings, impugning radical activists as "immoral, Godless, and disloyal.") In addition, FBI officials benefited from more conservative religious leaders, such as Carl McIntire, Edward Bundy, and Billy James Hargis—and conservative religious institutions, such as the Council of Christian Laymen and the Church League of America—both to promote that countersubversive rhetoric and to recruit fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons as agents.
The concluding essays in this collection chronicle a significant shift in FBI officials' conceptions of religious militants, in which the bureau came to appreciate the religious basis for millennial "cults" and militant Muslims. The book attributes this to two factors. The first was the more restrictive investigative guidelines instituted after the revelations of the 1970s, which temporarily endorsed a law enforcement standard for domestic security investigations. (These restrictions were loosened after the 9/11 attack.)
The second factor was criticism of the bureau's actions during the siege of the Branch Davidians. In the wake of the Waco controversy, FBI officials started soliciting input from scholars of religion to acquire a more nuanced understanding of both millennialists and Muslims. The agency then modified its conceptions of such groups, and it officially accepted that militant speech did not necessarily indicate an intent to violate the law or to engage in or promote violence. Nonetheless, it continued to monitor such religious groups, perceiving militancy as a possible indicator of future action.
This volume is particularly timely right now, given the debate over government surveillance of militant Muslims and given the Trump administration's proposed restrictions on immigration. Comey may not be another Hoover, but obsessive concerns over religious rhetoric and activism can still undermine core First Amendment values.
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]]>Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough, Penguin Press, 608 pages, $29.95
Beginning in 1969, a small but noisy segment of the radical left turned to bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings, jailbreaks, targeted assassinations of police officers, and other acts of violence. At the outset of Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough claims that the "most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how thoroughly it has been forgotten." His reconstruction of that period's activities profits from the journalist's extensive and revealing interviews with activists, their attorneys, and former FBI agents. The result is a comprehensive account of the lifestyles, motivations, and actions of the militants who went underground during the 1970s and '80s: the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, the United Freedom Front, the Mutulu Shakur Group.
Burrough characterizes these groups' headline-making behavior as "revolutionary violence," but they bore more real-world resemblance to crude terrorists and petty criminals. Their operations were uncoordinated, they lacked (and did not seek) broad support even within the radical political community, and, accordingly, they failed to seriously challenge established political and economic institutions. Yet despite their illegal actions, these activists for the most part escaped apprehension, whether by local police or the FBI. This is a striking failure, given the costs of their misdeeds: 23 people killed, 169 people wounded, more than a million dollars in property damage, more than a million dollars stolen.
Burrough's book is a riveting read, recapturing the senseless violence and perversity of the era. But it is of limited value to an understanding of the politics of the 1970s. Days of Rage has plenty of details about the activists' drug use, their sexual promiscuity, their extensive use of bombings (1,900 in 1972 alone), and their indifference to the consequences of violence for the broader radical movement. But the author is not well-informed on FBI operations, and his account says nothing about the paradoxical impact these radical activists had on the nation's political institutions.
So let's put this story in a broader context. In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Cold War produced a militantly anti-Communist politics that equated dissent with disloyalty. That in turn led to an expansion of presidential power and the FBI's surveillance authority. By contrast, the terrorism of the '70s did not give rise to a more repressive politics, to the expansion of the FBI's surveillance powers, or to an increase in presidential power, despite the bureau's failure to apprehend the people responsible for the violence. To the contrary, the 1970s witnessed an unprecedented reassessment of the role and authority of both the presidency and the FBI. One catalyst to these developments was the Nixon administration's reaction to the radicals' activities.
A review of FBI wiretapping authority highlights this reassessment. When Congress enacted legislation in 1934 regulating the communications industry, it adopted a section banning wiretapping. In rulings released in 1937 and 1939, the Supreme Court held first that this ban applied to federal agents and then that any indictment based on information derived from wiretaps would have to be dismissed.
Despite that ban and those rulings, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 secretly authorized FBI wiretaps during "national defense" investigations. (This was ostensibly intended to enable the FBI to anticipate and thus avert planned espionage or sabotage operations, but not to assist in the prosecution of spies and saboteurs.) Influenced by the security concerns of the Cold War era, Congress rescinded its ban in 1968. The new law required any proposed wiretap to be approved by a court in advance, but it also undercut the court's oversight role by stipulating that the warrant requirement shall not "limit the constitutional powers of the President to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the Nation against actual or potential attacks or other violent acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence deemed essential to the security of the United States, or to protect the United States against the overthrow of the Government by force or other unlawful measures, or against any other clear and present danger to the structure or existence of the Government."
When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, he interpreted that broad language as affirming his absolute power to authorize FBI wiretapping during an investigation of radical activists. The Supreme Court would reject this claim in 1972, at least as far as "domestic security" investigations were concerned. And in 1978, Congress would pass a law requiring officials to file affidavits with a special court affirming that a proposed surveillance subject was either in contact with a "foreign power," an "agent of a foreign power," or "an entity directed and controlled by a foreign government." But for now all that lay in the future.
Nixon's willingness to employ illegal investigative techniques was not confined to wiretapping. In 1970, frustrated by the FBI's inability to apprehend the underground activists and to document their suspected links with foreign Communist officials, the president appointed a special task force composed of the heads of four U.S. intelligence agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This group in turn recommended that the president authorize a series of techniques it acknowledged were illegal: break-ins, mail openings, interception of international communications, and the expanded use of wiretaps and bugs.
Recognizing the legal problems with the proposals and interested in ensuring deniability, Nixon rejected the task force's recommendation that he issue an executive order explicitly authorizing such uses. Instead, an authorization memorandum was issued under the name of Tom Charles Huston, the aide who had served as the White House's liaison to the task force. The memo thus became known as the Huston Plan.
A principal purpose underpinning the task force's recommendations had been to rescind orders that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had imposed in the mid-1960s. Hoover's orders banned practices that the FBI had employed since the 1940s (break-ins, mail opening) and limited the use of wiretaps and bugs. Hoover believed such techniques were now too risky politically, given the possibility of exposure and the more skeptical political climate of the 1960s. The director had pointedly objected to the task force's recommendations prior to their formal submission for Nixon's consideration.
For Hoover, Huston's signature constituted insufficient authority; if the FBI's employment of any of these techniques were discovered, he worried it could have adverse consequences for the bureau's reputation and his continued tenure as director. Accordingly, he advised Attorney General John Mitchell that he would submit a written memorandum whenever the FBI employed any of the recommended techniques, stipulating that this had been done pursuant to the president's plan. Mitchell immediately briefed Nixon of Hoover's intention, and the Huston Plan was hastily recalled.
The Huston Plan's highly secret records were soon publicly compromised. First, in 1973, White House aide John Dean turned a copy of the plan over to the Senate Watergate Committee. Then, in 1975, a committee headed by Sen. Frank Church that was investigating abuses in the intelligence community held public hearings on the program. Finally, in 1976, the Church Committee published the plan's text and the record of the task force's deliberations.
And that leads us back to the radical underground of the '70s. Although the Huston Plan was dead, the White House continued to pressure the FBI to use "all means necessary" to apprehend radical activists. In response, senior FBI officials authorized the New York field office to employ break-ins during an investigation of individuals suspected of association with the Weather Underground, an investigation that began in 1970 and continued through 1973. On its face, the order seemingly violated Hoover's ban on break-ins.
During the course of its investigations, the Church Committee obtained two secret memoranda of 1966 and 1967 that recorded Hoover's order banning future break-ins—in the FBI's parlance, "black bag jobs." The July 1966 memo described in detail the special records procedure, Do Not File, that Hoover had instituted in 1942 to preclude discovery of this bureau practice. Moreover, it conceded that because break-ins were "clearly illegal," FBI officials could not solicit the approval of the attorney general. To ensure that his unilateral approval could not be discovered (whether in response to a congressional subpoena or a court-ordered discovery motion), the director required that all requests from the heads of the 56 FBI field offices seeking his authorization of this practice and of the records of such operations were to be regularly destroyed.
The Church Committee's staff, after reviewing that memorandum, asked FBI officials to identify the "specific targets" of black-bag jobs and the number of "domestic security" break-ins conducted by the bureau from 1942 to 1966. FBI officials responded that due to the Do Not File procedure, "there is no central index, file, or document…no [extant] precise record of [such] entries." Instead, basing their response on a general review of FBI files and the recollections of agents at FBI headquarters, they estimated that during the 1942–1966 period the FBI had conducted "at least 239" break-ins "against at least fifteen domestic security targets." The FBI's proffered estimates suggested that break-ins had been employed sparingly and that only figures seen as legitimate security threats (i.e., American Communist Party officials and suspected Soviet agents) had been targeted.
This response was contradicted with the discovery in March 1976 that the head of the New York field office, John Malone, had maintained in his office safe a massive file recording the break-ins conducted by his team from 1954 to 1973. The Malone records, when reviewed, confirmed that the New York office alone (and just since 1954, not 1942) had conducted 433 break-ins targeting 250 to 300 different individuals and organizations. The Malone File (now incorporated in the FBI's central records system as the Surreptitious Entries File) further confirmed that FBI agents continued to conduct break-ins after 1966, using them against such targets as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the Weather Underground.
The Malone File confirmed that the FBI had conducted break-ins extensively, that it had principally targeted political activists, and that in the process senior FBI officials had created a culture of lawlessness within the ranks of the agency. One memorandum in the Malone File captures the mind-set that governed the bureau's operations. Senior FBI officials, learning that a New York agent attending a training session had remarked that he considered break-ins to be unconstitutional, immediately suspended the New York field office's break-in operations. When advised that no member of the New York office's break-in squad shared this heretical belief, they lifted the suspension.
The Malone File had further ramifications. Its unexpected discovery precipitated questions about the FBI's relationship with the Justice Department and its compliance with court-ordered discovery motions and congressional record requests. This is illustrated by bureau officials' response to a 1973 suit brought by the Socialist Workers Party and the unique circumstances that led to the indictment of two senior FBI officials in 1978.
The suit had been triggered by the public release that year first of the FBI's COINTELPRO files, which documented that the party had been one of that abusive program's targets, and then of the Huston Plan's proposed authorization of wiretaps and break-ins. Accordingly, the Socialist Workers Party's attorneys, during the trial's discovery phase, demanded all records of FBI wiretapping and break-ins involving their client. Based on FBI assurances, Justice Department attorneys conceded that the FBI had wiretapped the party but denied that there were any records of FBI break-ins.
With the discovery of the Malone File, U.S. attorneys moved quickly to advise the court that in fact the FBI had broken into the party's offices 94 times from 1960 to 1966. (The total turned out to be still higher. A further review of extant FBI records confirmed that agents had broken into Socialist Workers Party offices or party members' residences 208 times.) This admission proved to be an important factor in helping the socialists achieve a settlement award of $264,000 for the government's violation of their privacy rights.
By confirming that the FBI had continued to conduct break-ins targeting members of the Weather Underground after 1972, the Malone File meant that those involved could be prosecuted, their actions having fallen within the five-year statute of limitations. Justice Department attorneys, relying on the relevant extant records, thereupon launched an investigation that led to the indictment and conviction of senior FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller for authorizing these break-ins.
Thus, the Nixon administration's pressure on the FBI led not to the apprehension and conviction of radical activists but to the unprecedented conviction of senior FBI officials for a practice their predecessors had safely conducted for three decades. (When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he promptly pardoned both agents.)
Burrough's book barely touches on these surveillance operations, and at times it distorts their political and policy impact—misrepresenting, for example, the Supreme Court's 1972 wiretapping decision, the political impact of the Huston Plan, and the factors leading to the indictment and conviction of Felt and Miller. His account may be engaging to read, but it leaves the reader uninformed about the shifts in both the public's and Congress' ideas about executive secrecy and presidential claims to expansive "national security" powers.
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]]>The timely publication of Max Holland's Leak, coming on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, promotes a needed reassessment of two myths about the Watergate scandal. The first myth is that the reporting skills and diligence of two Washington Post cub reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, uncovered the abuses of power in Richard Nixon's White House and led to the president's forced resignation in August 1974.
Holland, editor of the website Washington Decoded, acknowledges the limited importance of Woodward and Bernstein's reporting but contends that their contribution pales in contrast to that of Federal Judge John Sirica, Sen. Sam Ervin's investigation and public hearings, the testimony of White House aides John Dean and Alexander Butterfield, and the inquiries of the special prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee (the latter when considering articles of impeachment).
The second, more important myth involves W. Mark Felt, the acting FBI associate director who in 1972 became Woodward's secret source, dubbed "Deep Throat." Holland rebuts Woodward and Bernstein's portrayal of Felt as a principled official who leaked information because he was concerned over the lawlessness of the Nixon White House. Felt's motives, as Holland convincingly documents, were more prosaic: He wanted Nixon to question whether he could trust Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray to control the FBI, thus leading the president to appoint Felt as the permanent FBI director, filling the vacancy caused by J. Edgar Hoover's recent death. Holland further documents that Felt withheld from Woodward some particularly explosive information about the White House attempting to use the CIA to contain the FBI's Watergate investigation. At other times, Felt passed on misinformation.
Holland's disclosure of Felt's insubordination does raise an important question: What emboldened this senior FBI official to betray his ostensible superior (while cunningly conveying the impression of a loyal acolyte), in the process unintentionally undermining Nixon's presidency?
The answer requires an understanding of the FBI's political culture forged during J. Edgar Hoover's 48-year tenure as the bureau's director. Since the mid-1930s, Hoover had expanded the FBI's role beyond federal law enforcement to operate surreptitiously as a political containment agency. FBI agents, accordingly, began to amass derogatory information about the personal and political activities of radical activists and prominent Americans, at times through the use of recognizably illegal investigative techniques. This information did not (and could not) advance legitimate law enforcement interests. Instead, Hoover and his senior aides exploited the information they acquired to advance their own bureaucratic and political agendas.
On the strict condition that the recipient not disclose the FBI as the source, the bureau leaked information to reliable reporters (including Walter Trohan, Don Whitehead, Courtney Ryley Cooper, Ed Montgomery, and Frederick Woltman), members of Congress (including Karl Mundt, Joseph McCarthy, James Eastland, Pat McCarran, William Jenner, and—yes—Richard Nixon), and other prominent Americans (including Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney, and Joseph Kennedy), as well as the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Felt's actions in 1972 and 1973 were exceptional only in the sense that his purpose was strictly personal and his target the current acting FBI director. He acted with the same sense of impunity as had his peers, in this case on the belief that his insubordination would not be discovered.
Felt's actions not only contributed to the unfolding Watergate affair but, more importantly in the long run, breached the wall of secrecy that had heretofore shrouded FBI operations from public scrutiny. The investigation of Nixon's role in the Watergate cover-up led to the exposure of his more serious abuses of the U.S. intelligence agencies: wiretapping prominent reporters, covert actions by the White House Plumbers, and, under the proposed Huston Plan, authorizing the use of illegal investigative techniques. In response, Congress in 1974—overriding President Gerald Ford's veto—enacted key amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that allowed reporters, activists, and scholars to obtain highly secret and revealing FBI records. That same year it enacted the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which ensured the preservation of the Nixon Oval Office tapes and transferred control over Nixon's presidential papers to the National Archives, and in 1978 it passed the Presidential Records Act, which defined presidential papers as public property and established the conditions and timing for giving the public access to them. And in 1975 it established special House and Senate committees that investigated and then publicized the abusive practices of the U.S. intelligence agencies from the 1930s through the '70s.
Combined, these actions ended FBI officials' absolute control over their agency's records, a change that eventually benefitted the research of Holland and others. Such research has expanded our awareness of how secrecy emboldened officials to violate privacy rights and the rule of law, and as such it offers a powerful, still relevant lesson in the adverse consequences inherent in blind deference to claims of "national security."
Athan Theoharis is a professor of history emeritus at Marquette University. His most recent book is Abuse of Power: How Cold War Surveillance and Secrecy Policy Shaped the Response to 9/11 (Temple University Press).
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