Webster's Test

He disciplines six agents

Ever since the glory days of J. Edgar Hoover, running the FBI has been the ruination of most directors' reputations. Hoover himself was demythologized after his death in 1972 by revelations of the racist, tyrannical and even lawless way in which he managed the bureau. Richard Nixon's appointee, ex-Navy Captain L. Patrick Gray, meekly let himself be used in the Watergate coverup. Clarence Kelley, the tough cop who had headed the Kansas City, Mo., police department, allowed himself to be hobbled by the Hoover clique of high-level bureaucrats at FBI headquarters. Last week former Federal Judge William H. Webster confronted the stiffest test of his ten months as FBI director and apparently passed.

The problem that he faced was a cruel one: what to do about 68 FBI agents and supervisors who had violated federal laws while searching for members of the radical, bomb-throwing Weatherman group in the early 1970s. Agents had burglarized the revolutionaries' homes, tapped their phones without warrants and monitored their mail. Gray and two former top assistants, Deputy Director W. Mark Felt and Intelligence Chief Edward Miller, had earlier been charged with violating citizens' civil rights. But it was up to Webster to decide whether to discipline the 68 members of FBI Squad 47, which operated from 1970 to 1975 in New York City, where most of the anti-Weatherman illegalities had occurred.

After agonizing for eight months, Webster announced a cautious decision. He fired two supervisors. They are Horace Beckwith, who headed Squad 47, and Brian Murphy, a Beckwith aide who, according to Webster, gave answers "unworthy of belief to questions about the burglaries. Another former supervisor, Charles Lunsford, was demoted for giving what Webster termed "evasive and inconsistent" answers. Suspended for 30 days was former Supervisor Gerard Hogan, for installing a listening device without a warrant. Two agents received wrist-tapping letters of censure. The other members of Squad 47 were not punished.

The FBI director must now tackle a more sensitive problem: how to deal with the FBI's cover-up of its illegal activites. A key point is why James B. Adams, a veteran headquarters bureaucrat who is now associate director, swore before congressional committees that the black-bag jobs had ceased in 1968, and why missing records proving that they continued into the 1970s later turned up in his ofiice.

A bit wistfully, perhaps, Webster told TIME last week: "I came here to take care of the present and future of the bureau, not the past." The past, however, is still a problem for any director of the FBI.

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