Discord and Disturbance at the FBI

Veteran agents challenge some decisions by their new chief

They came from New York City, from Philadelphia and Richmond, and from headquarters a few blocks away. They were all neatly dressed in jackets and ties, some still in the white shirts and short hair of yesteryear. On their own time and at their own expense, nearly 700 past and present FBI agents gathered last week in front of the U.S. courthouse in Washington for an extraordinary protest demonstration against the indictments of three former bureau officials.

L. Patrick Gray III, acting director of the bureau under President Nixon, W. Mark Felt, who ended his 31-year FBI career in 1973 as the bureau's second in command, and Edward S. Miller, who quit the bureau in 1974 after serving as assistant director of the intelligence division, were about to be arraigned for violating the civil rights of citizens--friends and relatives of Weatherman fugitives--by ordering illegal break-ins.

As the three strode through the crowd of G-men, applause rang out. At the courthouse door, New York Agent Patrick Connor read a statement: "Let this event assure the American people that our fight against terrorists was nothing more than our just and sworn duty." Replied Felt emotionally: "All I can say is God bless every one of you."

In court, when the charges were read to the three defendants, Gray defiantly shouted his answer: "Not guilty!" The other two entered similar pleas. They were all released on their own recognizance--a trial is not expected before fall--but they had to undergo the embarrassment of being mugged and fingerprinted, and having these documents added to the criminal files of the agency they once ruled.

Attorney General Griffin Bell, who is in charge of the FBI and who personally made the decision to indict the three men, was in Indianapolis to lecture the Indiana state bar association on his efforts at "holding the intelligence community to the rule of law," when he discovered that FBI agents there were preparing another demonstration against him. He promptly went to the local FBI office, where he confronted some 50 hostile agents and clerks. They presented him with a letter, signed by 100 agents, charging that "the FBI is being systematically destroyed for reasons unknown to us." Bell chided them. "Get rid of this hangdog attitude that somebody is after you," he declared. "You don't need me to be a nursemaid of any sort. You are all strong. Pick up your heads, and let's get going. I regret that you feel badly, but we had to do our duty."

Former bureau officials believe that Gray may have trapped himself in the alleged conspiracy when he gave his deputy, Felt, sweeping authority to do something about the Weathermen, and then failed to keep a sharp eye on Felt and the zealous Miller. Says one ex-FBI man: "You've got to remember that in those days Gray spent only three days a week in headquarters. He was out on the road, touring FBI offices, making speeches. He was almost totally preoccupied with the Watergate scandal during the limited time he spent in FBI headquarters. When requests for approval of bag operations came in, Felt and Miller handled them routinely. It's possible that Gray did not know what his subordinates were doing with the broad authority he gave them."

Felt and Miller claim that Gray gave them verbal authorization for the break-ins, but Gray denies talking with them about the matter. Along with offering this defense for Felt and Miller, their attorneys are likely to argue that the foreign connections of the Weathermen drew the case into the espionage classification. But Miller himself rejected that contention in an interview with a TIME reporter in August 1976. "I wish I could tell you that the foreign ties of the Weathermen were a factor," he said then, "but I can't. We looked into those connections and didn't find enough to justify the suspicion of espionage. My motivation in approving the break-ins was the bombings, the terrorism and my own desire to solve those cases."

The indictments of Gray, Felt and Miller, as well as the bureau's announced plans to discipline or dismiss 68 agents who carried out the "bag job" orders, were the most serious blows yet to the buffeted FBI. But many agents are less concerned, as one of them put it, "with those three turkeys" than with the current top leadership of the bureau.

The elevation earlier this month of James B. Adams, 51, to the No. 2 post in the bureau is at the core of their resentment. The promotion, one of the first major moves made by newly installed FBI Chief William Webster, angered veteran agents across the country not only because of Adams' record as a headquarters hatchet man for the late J. Edgar Hoover but also because of his lackluster performance as the FBI's chief of investigations for the past four years.

After Webster announced Adams' promotion and called him a man "who enjoyed the respect of the entire FBI," reaction from many longtime agents belied Webster's claim. "I was speechless," said a Chicago FBI man, "because I threw up." Asked a shocked Cleveland agent: "Is Adams the best this outfit can produce?" Another agent now likes to refer to FBI headquarters as a "Charlie McCarthy show," with Webster the dummy. Says he: "Whenever Webster opens his mouth, it's Adams talking."

Born in Texas, Adams was educated at Baylor University and served two years as a state legislator before joining the FBI in 1951. After less than two years in the field, he was assigned to the administrative division in Washington. At headquarters, under Division Chief John P. Mohr, Adams helped oversee the bureau's budgets, as well as firings and promotions, transfers of agents and disciplinary purges. Agents in the field reviled Mohr's administrators, but Adams prospered.

Adams and other top officials in the administrative division bestowed cash bonuses of $500 to $1,000 upon themselves for "outstanding service." Adams collected six of these so-called M.V.P. (Most Valuable Player) awards, prompting field agents, who rarely got such bonuses, to call him a "six-star general."

Adams became the bureau's personnel director in 1965, and was made an inspector in 1971. The next year he signed his name as a witness to a document that was supposedly signed in FBI headquarters by Hoover's top aide, Clyde Tolson. It was later revealed in a lawsuit that the Tolson signing never took place--his name had been written on the legal papers by his secretary--and Adams' reputation became more clouded.

When Hoover died in 1972, Gray took over and immediately scotched a plan to promote Adams again. Instead, trying to rid the bureau of hard-core Hooverites, Gray ordered Adams out of headquarters, to the backwater office in San Antonio. (Many veteran agents believe that Adams urged Attorney General Bell to prosecute Gray for the Weatherman break-ins to even the score.)

Clarence Kelley was appointed FBI director in 1973 and seemed to be having a hard time gaining control of the Bureau machinery. Retired Administrator Mohr, according to many agents, urged Kelley to bring Adams back from exile. Kelley did so, and Adams prospered: within a year, he was named the bureau's third in command, in charge of all FBI investigations. The promotion of Adams created one of Kelley's biggest headaches, forcing him to deny repeatedly that the bureau was being controlled by Hoover's people. The charge was that Mohr still flashed signals to Adams and to Nicholas Callahan, once Mohr's lieutenant and at that time Kelley's top aide.

Kelley's headache became acute when House hearings on FBI practices compelled him to open a probe into the corruption of an agency once thought incorruptible. It turned out that FBI administrators had sanctioned big markups in the price of bugging equipment bought by the bureau from a favored contractor, Joseph Tait. Mohr, Callahan, Adams and as many as a dozen other FBI officials regularly played poker with Tait at the Blue Ridge Club near Harpers Ferry, W. Va.

The FBI's investigation of itself was supervised by Callahan, Adams and another of Mohr's gambling buddies. After a two-month inquiry, the probers concluded that Mohr had done nothing wrong, the bureau's purchasing procedures were proper, and the games were just innocent social gatherings. Former Attorney General Edward H. Levi dismissed the findings as a whitewash and ordered the FBI to investigate again, under close Justice Department supervision. The second time around, the findings forced Kelley to discharge Callahan for misuse of FBI funds. Mohr, in retirement, was criticized, but Adams emerged unscathed.

Adams' supervision of FBI investigations has gained him even greater mistrust among veteran agents. They cite three reasons:

1) Adams has been unable to plug damaging leaks of FBI materials to the Mafia. In Cleveland, such leaks resulted last fall in the murders of two FBI informants and endangered a number of other sources.

2) When President Carter and Attorney General Bell were about to name a new FBI chief, the bureau's investigation into Bert Lance's affairs, supervised by Adams, stalled for a number of days. At the time, an FBI official admitted the bureau was "holding back" and later confirmed the delay when he proclaimed, "We're going full blast now." There have been no suggestions that either Carter or Bell ordered the stall. The bureau apparently took it upon itself to delay on Lance in order not to offend the Administration.

3) Adams was ordered by the Justice Department to give top priority to investigations of racketeering in the Teamsters Union. But agents soon discovered that two targets, Teamster Boss Frank Fitzsimmons and a powerful Ohio Teamster leader, were insulated from the probe by their "informant's relationship" with high FBI officials. The agents say that the Ohio Teamster leader manipulated the investigation by putting the bureau on the trail of his union enemies, small fry who were not essential to the case. Many agents question the value of using union chiefs as informants, insisting that they gain immunity from investigation but provide little in return.

Webster, of course, defends his choice of Adams. While he acknowledges his inexperience at the bureau, he says he knew what kind of director he did not want--"someone who says, 'We've got a right to do whatever we think is best for the country.' " Webster points out that he talked to many people before naming Adams. He consulted with Bell, Kelley, Congressmen and Senators, six FBI field commanders and the 15-man FBI executive conference. Of the latter group, however, two top-echelon bureau officials agree that "only a couple of those guys know what they're doing." Moreover, all of the six field commanders owe their present jobs to Adams. As for the veteran field agents most disturbed by Adams' rise, Webster readily admits that "I did not ask what they thought of Adams. I don't see many of them. I've been trying to get a grip here at headquarters."

By all accounts, Webster has been doing that at a breakneck pace, while making extra chores for himself by intentionally delaying for two months the appointment of an associate director. His most time-consuming task has involved wrestling with FBI budget problems and testifying about them before appropriation committees on Capitol Hill. Webster has also been working with the Justice Department in formulating a new charter for the FBI, which, Bell promises, should be ready by July. In short, Webster has been as busy as Americans would expect a new FBI director to be. As his knowledge of how the FBI functions deepens with time, his refutation of his "Charlie McCarthy" relationship with Adams--"I am the director of the FBI, and I am running it"--should increasingly ring true.

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