HOOVER OPENED A secret intelligence file at the end of 1945. He took unique copies of the reports his lieutenants sent him, and he wrote his thoughts in the margins, bearing down with a fountain pen, bringing forth scrawls of royal blue ink. The imprimatur of his initial—H.—made his words into commands.
Reading his handwritten notes is like hearing him think out loud. His rage was personal and political, bitter and implacable, barking and biting. He had high-soaring ideas, and he had hissing fits. His sense of humor was sarcastic, sometimes petulant. His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.
These files went on for twenty-seven years. They are, in effect, Hoover’s diary; they constitute his secret history of the Cold War. They reveal above all his abiding fear that America could lose the war on communism.
In 1946 and 1947 Hoover fought his battles on three fronts. He struggled for control of American intelligence. He fought to convince American leaders that the Cold War could last for the rest of their lives. And he started a campaign of political warfare against the president.
Hoover was enraged when he learned of Truman’s plans to create a new director of Central Intelligence who would claim dominion over the FBI’s operations against spies and traitors. “Completely unworkable,” he wrote to Attorney General Tom Clark on January 15, 1946. It would “wreck any existing agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The attorney general objected to his blunt language. Hoover fired back: “I most certainly don’t share views of A.G.… Appeasement can eventually bring about even more difficulties. H.”
To Hoover’s great consternation, on January 24, 1946, the president selected a rear admiral in the navy reserve, Sidney Souers, a Democratic Party stalwart from Missouri, as the first director of Central Intelligence. In an impromptu ceremony in the Oval Office, Truman gave Souers a black cloak, a black hat, and a little wooden dagger, knighting him as the chief of the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.” The next day, Hoover summoned Souers to his office at FBI headquarters. He soon had the admiral eating out of his hand. “He wanted it understood very clearly that he intended to depend upon the FBI to a large extent for advice and counsel,” Hoover wrote to his top assistants. He added the admiral to his list of useful underlings.
By himself, Hoover could not kill the blueprint for what became the Central Intelligence Agency. But he would do everything he could to protect his power. He went to the Pentagon to consult with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most powerful man in the American military. Hoover argued that Truman was going to ruin American espionage with the new Central Intelligence system. “General Eisenhower inquired how this would affect the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Hoover recorded. The director replied that “it appeared that the FBI would withdraw from foreign operations.” Eisenhower “expressed amazement and real concern.” Hoover added the general to his list of powerful allies.
Having failed to stop the investiture of the director of Central Intelligence, Hoover penetrated and sabotaged the fledgling spy agency.
Hoover had received a call for help from Colonel Bill Quinn, an army man who was trying to create a new Central Intelligence corps for covert operations and espionage. The colonel faced fierce opposition from the uniformed military, who told him his outfit was riddled with Communists. The FBI had files filled with rumors that Central Intelligence was hiring Reds.
Hat in hand, Quinn went to Hoover. This is how the colonel recalled it:
“What do you want me to do?” Hoover asked.
“Mr. Hoover,” Quinn said, “the simple answer to your question is to find out if I have any commies in my organization.”
“Well, we can do that,” Hoover said.
“While you’re doing it subversively, would you please check them criminally?”
“Before we decide on how to do it, for posterity, and for ultimate cooperation, I would like to ask that you send me a representative to be your liaison with my organization.”
At this, Hoover almost fell out of his seat, the colonel recalled. “I know what was going on in his mind,” Quinn recounted. “He was probably thinking, ‘My God, this guy is asking for a direct penetration in his agency.’ ”
Quinn had just invited Hoover to spy on his spies. Liaison was penetration. You shook hands with the right hand and picked pockets with the left.
The Bureau investigated the political loyalties of dozens of Central Intelligence officers, many of whom were hired specifically for their Russian and Eastern European backgrounds, making them suspect in Hoover’s eyes. The first three directors of Central Intelligence asked Hoover to provide them with seasoned FBI officers, field training, formal reports, the names and identities of trusted informants and recruited foreign agents. Hoover took pleasure in rejecting their pleas.
His resentment over his exclusion from worldwide intelligence smoldered. He aimed to regain his preeminence.
At Hoover’s request, Admiral Souers wrote to President Truman on April 17, 1946: “It is of the utmost urgency that the Federal Bureau of Investigation be permitted to continue its security functions … in the countries of the Western Hemisphere, in London, Paris, Rome, Manila, Tokyo, and the American Zone in Germany. The security mission which it performs may be illustrated by the Canadian investigation in Ottawa which reaches into the United States as well as England.”
The “Canadian investigation” was about to begin to reveal the reach of Soviet espionage into America’s atomic arsenal.
The case began with the carelessness of a thirty-six-year-old Red Army lieutenant, Igor Sergeyevich Guzenko, who served as one of Stalin’s spies in the office of the Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, Canada. He was a code clerk who handled secret cables and ciphers. One night he tossed aside two rough drafts of encoded messages to Moscow. A cleaning woman who doubled as a Soviet security officer found the crumpled communiqués and informed the ambassador. The penalty for security violations in Stalin’s secret service was Siberian exile or death. Guzenko gathered up every secret cable he could carry and fled for his life. He spent three days on the run before convincing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to protect him.
The FBI’s legal attaché in Ottawa joined in the interrogation of Guzenko. Hoover soon put seventy-five agents on the case.
The Guzenko case revealed four facts: Ottawa was a command center for Soviet espionage throughout North America. The Soviets had placed a spy somewhere inside the State Department. A British nuclear physicist named Allan Nunn May had penetrated the Manhattan Project for Moscow. The theft of the secret of the atomic bomb was the highest priority of Soviet intelligence.
Another defector from the world of Soviet espionage now was in the FBI’s hands. Her name was Elizabeth Bentley; she had been a committed American Communist. She had first approached the FBI in 1942, but the Bureau did not take her at her word. She was confused, intellectually and ideologically, about why she was switching sides.
“She was a flake. A wacko, really,” said FBI special agent Jack Danahy, who worked the case for years. “She had a series of crazy lovers, Fascists in Italy and Communists in the United States.” When she turned to the FBI, “she made a play for every agent in the office that she talked to.… We worried about it. But, hey, we weren’t finding informants in convents, you know.”
The Bureau always had its doubts about Bentley. She was a heavy drinker, but she seemed to have a good memory when sober. Her story was strange, but this much was true: Bentley had been a courier who served a network of Soviet spies. She named names—eighty in all, though none would ever go to jail for espionage, and only two would ever be convicted of any crime.
Hoover decided to accept the confessions of this eccentric turncoat.
Her revelations let the FBI begin to trace the outlines of a Soviet intelligence system that had been aiming to penetrate the United States government for a dozen years. After the FBI accepted Bentley’s bona fides, Hoover assigned 227 agents to the investigation. But he had already shared the gist of the case with his British intelligence counterpart in Washington. The word had been passed to London. And it had been relayed to Moscow, courtesy of Kim Philby, the Soviet mole inside the British service.
The Soviets had swiftly heeded Philby’s alert. They ordered most of their wartime intelligence officers out of the United States, and cut off contact with many of their networks of agents. When the FBI went looking for the Soviets, they found they were trying to lasso shadows.
President Truman read Hoover’s next report to the White House on May 29, 1946, with disbelief.
“There is an enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington,” Hoover wrote in a “personal and confidential” message to the president and the attorney general. “A number of high Government officials whose identities will be set out hereinafter are involved.” Some of the names on the list were shocking. Hoover’s suspects included the undersecretary of state, Dean Acheson, and the former assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, two pillars of the American establishment whose anti-Communist credentials never had been questioned.
The attorney general did not believe it either. “It was a time of some hysteria,” Clark said. But he was learning to take the power of Hoover’s secret intelligence seriously. He discovered that Hoover was keeping watch on him as well. “Whenever any derogatory information about me would come into the Department, why, they would put it in that file,” Clark said. “It was outrageous.”
Hoover continued trying to convince the White House that Stalin’s spies were trying to steal America’s atomic secrets. He was urged on by the FBI’s intelligence chief, Mickey Ladd, the son of a United States senator from North Dakota. Ladd called for an all-out, no-holds-barred war on communism—including mass arrests and detentions of suspected subversives—in the name of counterespionage. Ladd wanted to put every one of the roughly eighty thousand members of the Communist Party of the United States on the FBI’s secret Security Index. Once indexed, they could be arrested in a national roundup under a mass warrant “in the event of an emergency.”
Hoover agreed. Without revealing the existence of the Security Index, he told Attorney General Clark that the FBI was going to “intensify its investigation of Communist Party activities” and “list all members of the Communist Party and others who would be dangerous in the event of a break in diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.” Hoover wrote in the plainest possible language that a political crisis could make it necessary “to immediately detain a large number of American citizens.”
Hoover’s war with the White House intensified. He had requested the money to hire hundreds more men to investigate Soviet espionage and Communist subversion. Truman instead eliminated six hundred of Hoover’s agents, nearly one out of seven from the FBI’s front ranks, in the first budget he sent to Congress. The FBI had not faced such a drawdown since Hoover became its director. Hoover reacted to the cutbacks by ordering his overseas agents back home.
On July 8, 1946, Hoover told his agents in Latin America and the Caribbean to close down their operations immediately. He had promised the new director of Central Intelligence, General Hoyt Vandenberg, a year for a smooth transition. But by summer’s end, the FBI had left behind nothing but empty offices and angry ambassadors.
“Move rapidly & get out of it as quickly as possible,” he commanded. Seven weeks later, the FBI was all but gone from Central America and the Caribbean, and it soon would be out of South America too. “All investigative files, both pending and closed, were burned,” Hoover’s field lieutenant, C. H. “Kit” Carson, reported to headquarters as he shut down operations in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba.
Hoover went to the White House and laid down the law. If the president wanted the FBI out of the realm of foreign intelligence, if he wanted the director of Central Intelligence in charge, that was what he would get.
But nobody who had ever worked at the Bureau—active, retired, first-rate, third-rate—would be allowed to work for the new Central Intelligence Agency, Hoover told the president’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy. The admiral advised General Vandenberg “to avoid offending Mr. Hoover.” But when Vandenberg proposed to create a global registry of foreign contacts, Hoover warned his top FBI aides: “Watch with meticulous care any & all Directives of this outfit as I think it is drunk with power & will slyly grasp for everything.” When Hoover saw newly drafted legislation that would give the director of Central Intelligence more authority, he wrote: “The ‘empire builders’ … perpetuate their present monstrosity and intrude even more into civilian and domestic fields.”
Hoover’s refusal to work with the fledgling CIA approached insubordination. His defiance of the State Department neared rebellion. Hoover’s spiteful decision threatened “a major blow to the effectiveness of our security and intelligence work,” wrote Undersecretary of State Acheson. Hoover was undeterred. He had all but declared war on the White House.
“I think we ought to have a showdown,” he wrote to Mickey Ladd.
His rage at the president’s reluctance to fight a full-bore war on communism grew ferocious. He began to petition members of the Senate and House to give him the power to protect America against “the threat of infiltrating foreign agents, ideologies and military conquest.” His views on the threat were so strong that they started to sway the liberals of Washington—and through them, the president himself.
Hoover was creating the political culture of the Cold War in the United States.