The File on J. Edgar Hoover

UNDER J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorial, 47-year rule, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has in the past been widely regarded as one of the finest law-enforcement agencies in the world. Yet now the 76-year-old director's fiefdom shows evidence of crumbling, largely because of his own mistakes. The FBI's spirit is sapped, its morale low, its initiative stifled. For the first time, there are doubts within the bureau and within the Administration about the FBI's ability to serve as an effective agency against subversion. An experienced former CIA agent, until recently an open admirer of the director, remarks unhappily: "Hoover, because of his personal pride, has seriously affected the efficient operation of American intelligence. And personal pride in a matter of national security has no place. If a guy does that, he is a real liability."

For months a feud between Hoover and one of his most senior assistants has shaken the higher levels of the bureau. In the midst of a bureaucratic war of memos, some FBI men have resigned to escape the crossfire. Said one Justice Department official who has followed the battle: "Hoover is flailing out in all directions. Everybody in the FBI is looking for cover." Even more significant is the pattern of damaging isolation in which Hoover has placed the bureau. A year and a half ago, he ordered the FBI to break off direct daily liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency, raising apprehension in the intelligence community about effective counterespionage in the U.S.

Hoover gave those orders in irritation over a minor piece of information that was relayed by an FBI agent in Denver to a CIA employee in 1969. The case involved the disappearance of a Czech-born University of Colorado professor named Thomas Riha. The FBI had refused to give the president of the university any assurance that the disappearance did not involve foul play, but an FBI agent, acting on his own, told a CIA employee that it did not. The CIA man passed on the message --no foul play--to the president, who then let it slip to the press. Hoover was furious. Because of that fairly obscure incident, he has limited most FBI contacts with the CIA since then to written and telephone messages and occasional direct meetings that he specifically approves.

Sharing the Glory. Given the complexity of most espionage cases, coordination between the two agencies is often crucial. Men from the FBI and CIA continued, on rare occasions, to circumvent Hoover's directive by meeting privately, without his knowledge. CIA men complained that Hoover's action effectively cut off the international from the national intelligence effort. One former CIA agent argues that Hoover, finding himself under heavy attack, believes that he is safer making fewer moves and allowing fewer initiatives so that there is less possibility of a damaging mistake.

Last July, Hoover increased his bureau's isolation by abolishing the seven-man FBI section that maintained contact with other U.S. intelligence units --including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the individual armed services' intelligence networks. Some observers speculated that Hoover took the action to prove that he was not discriminating against the CIA, that all major contacts could be handled by telephone and mail. In fact, Hoover has never been eager to exchange information with other intelligence agencies and police departments. Says a former FBI official: "We've never gone out of our way to cooperate. That would mean sharing the so-called glory. It's an infantile view of things."

In recent months, Hoover has displayed a certain vindictiveness in more minor matters. Angered by a TWA pilot's criticism of an FBI attempt to prevent a skyjacking, Hoover first tried to have the pilot fired, then ordered his agents not to fly on TWA any more. Hoover also concluded that the Xerox Corp. was not cooperating sufficiently in an investigation of the theft of documents from an FBI office in Media, Pa. The FBI learned that copies of the documents distributed to newspapers were made on Xerox machines, and Xerox executives, in Hoover's judgment, did not disclose enough about customers who used the Xerox machines. He proposed replacing all of the FBI Xerox machines with IBM equipment, and was dissuaded only when told it would cost millions.

Ironic Temple. Seven months before Hoover passed the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1965, Lyndon Johnson extended his tenure indefinitely. Nixon has been as reluctant as past Presidents to face the political outcry that might follow the repudiation of a legend. A tangle of political ironies surrounds the director's present relations with the Nixon Administration. The President and Attorney General John Mitchell have been hoping for months to ease Hoover out with great ceremony and public thanks for his long, remarkable career.

The Administration has grown increasingly disenchanted with Hoover's performance, believing that the FBI was doing too little in intelligence against Soviet agents and against domestic radicals. Yet last spring, when Democrats in Congress led an attack against the FBI for the opposite reason --what they saw as an overzealous expansion of intelligence investigations --the Administration was forced to defend Hoover and postpone his retirement. There are those who believe that Hoover deliberately embroils himself in political controversies precisely because they serve to prolong his tenure. At least one highly ranked Justice Department official has urged reporters not to write stories critical of Hoover, so that the FBI director can be decorously removed.

Bag Jobs. Hoover's feud with William C. Sullivan, the former No. 3 man at the bureau, is a measure of the Administration's dilemma. At 59, Sullivan is a 30-year veteran of the bureau with an impressive reputation among intelligence officers here and abroad.

Although long a favorite of Hoover's, Sullivan quarreled with his boss a decade ago over his non-Hooverian contention that the Ku Klux Klan represented a greater threat than the U.S. Communist Party. Since 1967, they have been at odds about espionage restrictions, ordered by Hoover, that severely limited FBI investigations of spies. Alarmed at rising criticism of such practices, Hoover curtailed the use of wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping in espionage cases. He also banned what intelligence called "surreptitious entry"--meaning burglary --and a companion tactic, the "bag job," in which agents enter a home or office and examine or copy documents, personal papers or notebooks. In the past, numerous spies--notably Rudolf Abel--have been exposed by bag jobs.

Civil libertarians have long condemned such tactics; Hoover's restrictions, however, resulted only from a pragmatic desire to avoid embarrassing incidents and from his belief that American public opinion would not condone "dirty games" by FBI agents. Along with these strictures, the federal anti-racketeering statutes of the 1960s increased FBI responsibility for organized-crime cases and hence necessarily reduced the number of agents available for espionage assignments.

The restrictions and manpower cuts, Sullivan believed, reduced the FBI's capacity to cope with spies at a time when the Soviets were expanding their espionage networks in the U.S. There is thus the irony that Hoover, so often accused of an "archaic" anti-Communist preoccupation, was actually less militant on the subject, in some ways, than Sullivan.

But the ideological boundaries of the current dispute are confusing. A year ago, Sullivan addressed a United Press International conference in Williamsburg, Va., on the dangers to domestic security posed by extremists of both left and right. He minimized the threat from the U.S. Communist Party, a heterodox position that violated

Hoover's familiar thesis that Communists are behind New Left extremists. Sullivan expressed far greater concern that leftist excesses would drive the nation's moderates, its "vital center," toward a dangerous rightist reaction.

Mail Covers. Early last year, the Nixon Administration, too, began to worry that the government was not using its intelligence resources effectively enough. A committee of intelligence experts, assembled by the White House with Hoover as chairman, met for weeks discussing ways of coping with foreign spies, racial unrest, campus disorders and leftists in the antiwar movement. Finally, the committee suggested a sweeping expansion of federal intelligence work. Specifically, the committee urged wider use of wiretapping, inspection of letters--"mail covers" --surreptitious entries and bag jobs. Sullivan sympathized with the committee's objectives. Hoover, although chairman, firmly dissented. The White House ordered the suggested policies implemented anyway, but Hoover, appealing to Mitchell, managed to have the White House directive withdrawn. Hoover was infuriated by Sullivan's later attempt to loosen the restrictions he had ordered.

Publicly, the President has had nothing but praise for Hoover; he showed up at an FBI academy graduation last June to say: "The great majority of Americans back Mr. Hoover." Privately, Nixon's men became increasingly critical. In espionage cases, they said, Hoover's FBI, by carrying out fewer bag jobs, failed to supply the raw material that the National Security Agency needed to break codes. "The codes might have been used by the deep-cover 'illegals,' the foreign spies," explained a Justice Department official. "Hoover hasn't caught an illegal in the last six years."

Correcting the Record. Further, the Administration was irritated by Hoover's attempts to withhold information from the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department. There was also concern that several times his testimony before congressional committees was wrong--although FBI agents were generally allowed to correct the mistakes before they were entered in the record. Mitchell was especially angered by the way in which Hoover endangered the Justice Department's case against the Rev. Philip Berrigan and others charged with conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger, Nixon's foreign-affairs adviser. Hoover insisted on telling a Senate subcommittee about the alleged plot last November, more than a month before a grand jury began to return indictments.

Last summer, as the Administration's dissatisfaction with Hoover increased, the Justice Department took unprecedented steps to curb the director, who for decades had worked with virtual autonomy. The department's public relations men began editing Hoover-drafted FBI crime reports and news releases. Then Mitchell intervened directly in FBI internal affairs, urging new courses of action and, in some areas, bluntly telling Hoover to change his way of doing things. Hoover accepted the orders, but later fulminated that someone within the FBI was giving the Administration a false picture of his operations. In late July, Hoover dropped Sullivan to No. 4 in the bureau by creating a new post a notch above him. On Aug. 31, Hoover summoned Sullivan to his office and heatedly berated him for 2 1/2 hours. He implied that Sullivan was insolent and disloyal and made it clear that he wanted him to resign.

Blue Gem. A few days later, Hoover ordered Sullivan to take two weeks' leave. Sullivan wrote back that a one-week vacation was all he needed. The memo came back inscribed with what is known in the FBI as a "blue gem"--a handwritten note from the director. (Hoover is the only person in the FBI who uses blue ink, so that his messages are instantly recognizable. Other FBI officials use pencil, in part because if they approve a memo moving up the chain of command and then Hoover inks in his disapproval, they can erase their judgment as the memo descends through the chain). Hoover's "gem" to Sullivan: "Take two weeks.--H."

Sullivan left Washington on Sept. 13, and Hoover moved immediately to choose his successor. He settled on Alex Rosen, chief of the FBI's General Investigative Division. By the time Sullivan returned to Washington, Rosen was occupying his office. On Oct. 1 Sullivan put himself on "sick leave." That same day, the locks were changed in his office and his name plate removed from the door. On Oct. 2, the FBI announced that Sullivan had retired voluntarily.

If Sullivan had believed that Hoover would be eased out by January, there was now speculation that he would be around for another year or more. It was evident that Hoover, long a master of federal bureaucracy, had managed to swing the Administration back to his side. The Justice Department did one thing for Sullivan. Asked about the FBI announcement that he had retired voluntarily, a department official replied: "That was a Hooverian lie." It was little comfort to Sullivan, who reluctantly gave up his long fight on Oct. 6 and resigned.

The Sullivan-Hoover battle was more than simply an internal bureaucratic feud, and more even than a controversy over different approaches to intelligence operations. It raised serious questions about a secretive, enormously powerful Government agency under dictatorial rule, operating on its own, answerable to no authority except the judgments --or whims--of one man.

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