America’s Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s Illegal Powers/Part II: The Continuity of COG Detention Planning,

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The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013.

America’s Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s Illegal Powers

“Dear Bess…. Hoover would give his right eye to take over [from the Secret Service] and all Congressmen and Senators are afraid of him. I’m not and he knows it. If I can prevent [it] there’ll be no NKVD or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me.”

-- President Harry S Truman, 1947

"The other night, we picked up a situation where this senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad was with him. We got the information, reported it in a memorandum, and by noon the next day, the senator was aware that we had the information, and we never had trouble with him on appropriations since."

-- FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach¹

“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. Democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

--Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, during a speech at CIA headquarters, 1988.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."²

--Lord Acton in an April 1887 letter to the Anglican Bishop of London.

Peter Dale Scott

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J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Our Doomsday Mania

Both scholars and ordinary Americans now look back with relief on McCarthyism and “the anticommunist hysteria of the early 1950s,”^[3] in the belief that we have outgrown such paranoia and disregard for law and human rights. But the personal excesses of McCarthy were surface manifestations of deeper illegal institutional procedures, mostly initiated by J. Edgar Hoover, that never really ended, and indeed have since proliferated.

Joseph McCarthy

This has been especially true since the implementation of Continuity of Government (COG) measures on 9/11, measures that for two decades had been refined in the Pentagon’s “Doomsday Project,” by an extra-governmental (and arguably unconstitutional) secret committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.⁴ As Patrick Thronson has observed in a law journal article, “continuity-of-government procedures…confer powers on the President—such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order.”⁵ Yet some of these measures were then hastily made law in the USA PATRIOT act of 2001, in support of the so-called “War on Terror.”⁶

In the 9/11 Commission Report we read (p. 394) that “Congress responded, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the Patriot Act.” But the Patriot Act, which Congress (nudged by false-flag anthrax attacks) passed without time to read it, did not begin as a response to 9/11. Like the infamous Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, with which it deserves to be compared, it had been prepared well before the event to which it “responded,” in this case slowly and patiently over decades, starting in the 1950s. In other words, it was the product of an almost continuous level of secret emergency planning, going back to J. Edgar Hoover, that I shall show to have underlain both 9/11 and Iran-Contra, and perhaps even Watergate.

As Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman have noted,

Among the most striking features of the PATRIOT Act was its resurrection of the long-discredited Huston Plan of 1970. The new bill permitted the FBI, CIA, and other agencies to engage in activities that had so horrified Attorney General John Mitchell that he convinced Nixon to rescind the plan four days after it was promulgated. Mitchell considered unconstitutional the Huston Plan’s provisions for warrantless wiretapping, opening of mail, “black-bag” burglaries by U.S. agents, surveillance of various sorts, and preventive detention.⁷

Attorney General John Mitchell authorized some illicit measures; but also, at Hoover’s urging, he rescinded one, the so-called Huston Plan. Photograph James Atherton

And the “threat” which the Huston Plan had addressed (in the same year as the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State) was an internal one: the danger that anti-war and other popular movements might force a lasting foreign policy change on Nixon and his successors: a change preventing America from waging future aggressive wars. (At one stage the Huston Plan envisaged the creation of camps in Western states for the detention of anti-war protesters.)

Two of the provisions that Mitchell found unconstitutional – warrantless surveillance and preventive detention – can be found not just in the Patriot Act of 2001, the COG provisions of the 1980s, and the Huston Plan of 1970, but still further back: in the review of emergency detention plans ordered by LBJ after the March 1967 March on the Pentagon,⁸ and in the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 (eventually overturned).⁹ Ultimately the plans derive from secret powers that Hoover illegally arrogated to himself, despite explicit prohibitions from different Attorneys General.¹⁰

At this point one can narrate two different histories of these secret or deep powers. On the public level, the emergency detention provisions of the McCarran Act were never used; and they were repealed in 1971, as Hoover’s reputation finally withered and Congress became more responsive to antiwar dissenters. But on a deeper level, Congress had achieved far less than they had hoped.

Attorney General John Mitchell approved FBI Director Hoover’s recommendation that the FBI continue investigating individuals “who pose a threat to the internal security of the country” for inclusion in an “administrative” index for anticipated future detention.¹¹

In other words, the only practical consequence of the Congressional repeal was that Hoover’s existing Security Index for the detention of individuals now had a new name.¹²

Also on a deeper level, the planning for detention continued, almost without a break, until it was finally put into effect on 9/11. In like fashion other illicit powers, initiated by Hoover, were either developed or implemented, first by the Nixon White House and later under Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey and Oliver North. On the public level, again, thanks largely to the congressional investigations of Watergate and Iran-Contra, these proliferations were checked. But I hope to show that, while both Nixon and North were ousted, the plans for illegality they encouraged continued, almost continuously, on a deeper level.

This essay demonstrates that these deep powers are illegal, unchecked, and for the most part unwarranted. Some of them may indeed be needed, because America’s dangers both at home and abroad today do in fact call for unusual and perhaps unprecedented responses. The recent horror of the Boston Marathon bombings makes this all too clear. But the Boston tragedy was not solved by the grandiose excess of locking down an entire city, but by legal and public methods of police work. The case illustrates one main thesis of this essay: that the deep powers assembled by the unchecked American security state are vastly in excess of what is needed, to the point of being counterproductive.

J. Edgar Hoover

They have not been designed to meet real threats today, but are the result of past unchecked bureaucratic proliferation since the 1950s, mostly after the real Soviet threat to U.S. security had passed.¹³ They were refined with sustained energy by COG planners in the 1980s, when the “Soviet threat” had become a phantom resurrected only in the propaganda mills of William Casey’s CIA.

The key to the renewed planning was the specter of Soviet-inspired terrorism. The notion that the Soviet Union was behind global terrorism was forced on CIA professional analysts in 1981 by CIA Director Casey, citing a single book, Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, that is now almost universally discredited.¹⁴ Yet the hysterical CIA estimates at that time of the Soviet threat soon became permanently embodied in the hysterical provisions of the Doomsday Project, especially after their implementation in 2001. I shall argue shortly that these unchecked measures, far from being a response to 9/11 and al Qaeda, actually contributed (perhaps blindly), to the events that now are used to justify them.

And when we compare the fifties to what is happening now, we must recognize that America today is caught up in a new hysteria, or collective insanity, that is far more over-reaching and dangerous to personal liberty than the hysteria of either Joe McCarthy or William Casey. Warrantless surveillance and detention, in particular, exist today on a scale that would have been inconceivable then. And, as before, on a scale vastly beyond both the law and what is actually needed for our security.

As in the case of McCarthyism, the people are not the original sources of this hysteria, but receptacles and responders to a hysteria generated by their leaders. There were many reasons for this hysteria in the Cold War, some of them not at all irrational. But central to the origin of Hoover’s illegal unchecked powers was his autointoxication with his own power. One of my most certain conclusions from writing this essay is an adaptation of Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, written in a comparable era of rapidly expanding and unchecked British imperial powers.

Lord Acton wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."^[15] Even in the absence of absolute power, we can still say that “Power tends to intoxicate, and unchecked power intoxicates irrevocably." Since World War Two we have seen the conspicuous examples of Truman’s Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and later senior CIA officer Frank Wisner: both these men went insane, had to be removed from office, and subsequently committed suicide. Less dramatic were the cases of McCarthy and President Nixon: neither man was ever certified insane, but both lost power rapidly when they succumbed to the follies of their manic or paranoid power overreaches.¹⁶

I will argue that the same model of manic or paranoid self-destruction applies, less conspicuously, to other figures, less important in public history than in this present narrative of unchecked power: men such as Assistant FBI Director “Crazy” Bill Sullivan, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, Oliver North, and most recently Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.¹⁷ All three men abused their assigned powers irrationally, to such an extent that their excesses resulted in their being driven from office.¹⁸ (An important, instructive, but more debatable example is that of Hoover himself. Hoover survived for decades as long as he was restrained in his exercise of power; but both his sanity and his invulnerability were visibly weakening before his death.)

It is a tribute to the long-term sanity and homeostasis of the American political system that all these men – the central figures in this essay – lost clout to a greater or lesser degree after this inevitable autointoxication from unchecked power. Unfortunately the process I am describing is not a wholly self-correcting one. All of these men (except Hoover) were ousted. But the hysteria they had generated not only survived, but in every case became more securely grounded in excessive secret institutional arrangements: the modern unchecked security state.¹⁹

What shall we call the new hysteria? I was once tempted to call it Cheneyism, after the man who with Donald Rumsfeld planned for the resurrection of these unconstitutional practices for almost twenty years, before implementing them on the morning of 9/11. But the new hysteria has outlasted Cheney, and is by now far more institutionalized than the eccentric vagaries of either McCarthy or even his puppet-master, J. Edgar Hoover. But even at this deeper structural level, we see a recurring cycle of manic institutional repressiveness (notably under Richard Nixon) followed by efforts of saner retrenchment (the post-Watergate reforms of the late 1970s instituted chiefly by the Senate Church Committee). Since 9/11 the institutional proliferation of secret, self-defeating repressive powers has become manic again, much as our economy in the same decade has passed through recurring periods of manic exuberant bubbles, followed by recession.²⁰

I call our new hysteria the Doomsday Mania, after the Doomsday Project that was the Pentagon’s name for the 20 years of COG planning to suspend parts of the U.S. Constitution.²¹ The Doomsday Project began under Reagan in 1982 as emergency planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.”²² Expanded at the end of the Reagan presidency to cover planning for any emergency, the planning was entrusted to a secret committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, even when both men were no longer in the U.S. Government.²³ Composed mostly of fellow Republicans, even under Clinton, the committee became what a former Pentagon official described as in effect “a secret government-in-waiting.”²⁴

From its outset in 1982 to its implantation on 9/11, the Doomsday Project was indeed apocalyptic, in its baseless determination that America faced a terrorist crisis so dire that the constitution needed to be partly set aside. A decade before 9/11, its far-reaching arrangements were expanding the groundwork of Oliver North, to create what CNN in 1991 already described as a “shadow government…about which you know nothing.”²⁵

Taking the long view, we can see that the human rights granted (or recognized) by the American Constitution were so broad and unprecedented that they have bred cycles of hysteria almost from their outset.²⁶ In the elections of 1796 and 1800 Republicans claimed that John Adams was determined to restore monarchy in the United States, while Federalists conversely feared that Jefferson and his allies might import into America the worst features of the French Revolution.²⁷

Elected as president, Adams, fearing French revolutionary intervention, secured the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. These bestowed on the president ill-defined powers to criminalize free speech and to detain and deport resident aliens he deemed dangerous. In short the new era of freedoms under checks and balances had swiftly bred its opposite: a resort to unchecked presidential powers to restrain those freedoms.

This dialectic between checked (constitutional or public) and unchecked (secret or deep) powers has marked American history ever since, especially in America’s rapid expansion since World War II from a democracy into a global empire. In seven decades we have seen such well-publicized crises as the U-2 flap in 1960 which ended plans for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit, Nixon’s conflict with Congress and the courts in the Watergate crisis, and Reagan’s showdown with Congress in the Iran-Contra crisis. Less noticed were other contests between checked and unchecked power that were no less momentous – such as the so-called Halloween massacre of 1975, part of Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s successful campaign from the Ford White House to block the efforts of Senator Church and others to bring the CIA and FBI under more effective congressional restraints.²⁸

The nation’s divisions in 1796 anticipated our division today. Madison’s comment on Adams’ behavior is especially pertinent: “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.”²⁹ And while most Americans probably remember the deportation features of Adams’s laws as a quaint anachronism, a Homeland Security (DHS) publication of 2003, enacting COG provisions for massive detention in a ten-year Project Endgame, announced that its

Detention and Deportation Program, now the Office and Detention and Removal (DRO), was established in a 1955 reorganization of the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] to carry out a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798…. Legislation since then has expanded the detention and removal operations…³⁰

The INS detention program of the 1950s was the result of detention measures in the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which Congress repealed in 1971. As we shall see, these measures were the embodiment in law of detention and deportation powers that Hoover had earlier arrogated to himself illegally. But far greater numbers of Americans were illegally detained after 9/11 than were ever detained by Hoover.³¹

Warrantless surveillance, another feature of the new Doomsday Mania, has as we shall see, a similar history tracing back to Hoover. Though statistics are lacking, it would appear that such surveillance today is also far more widespread than under Hoover. And Hoover’s practice of leaking illegally gathered information to blacken people’s reputations, causing them to lose their jobs or be defeated for reelection, has been revived by the FBI today.

The post-9/11 Doomsday mania has also been marked by the widespread use of torture in interrogations, and also by targeted assassinations, even against U.S. citizens. As we shall see, such practices were also used in the Hoover era, but sparingly. President Obama has ordered an end to torture practices, but has radically increased the use of drones for targeted assassinations – a tactic once explicitly forbidden by presidential order.

In a sense drone killings today are not secret, but the Obama administration consistently lies about the program, leading Glen Greenwald to comment, “People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can act in the dark.”^[32] The NSA meanwhile is engaged in a domestic data-mining program that is so extensive former NSA insiders fear it could help “create an Orwellian state.”³³

Americans are left with a vague sense that their country has changed, but are mostly (as in the era of McCarthyism) either too caught up in the Doomsday Mania to recognize its paranoia, or else frozen in a state of semi-traumatized denial (much like the “good Germans” of the 1930s).³⁴ The minority who oppose the present mania mostly feel either powerless, or uncertain as to what first step must be taken to end it.³⁵

Meanwhile we are living under a government that in certain respects is increasingly lawless and out of control. It is true that the government is facing new challenges of a type never experienced before, and that some emergency measures are justifiable in this crisis. But clearly the breakdown of legal restraints is counterproductive in the badly named “War on Terror.” To give just one example, the number of jihadist warriors in the world has increased, as Tim Weiner notes, after “the images from Abu Ghraib became a recruiting poster across the world.”³⁶ This example of counterproductive unchecked illegality is not just an anecdote, but only one example of how the so-called “War on Terror” has done more to generate and perpetuate terror than to contain it.³⁷

Weiner believes that the Doomsday Mania has in some respects abated since the first G.W. Bush administration, because the FBI under Obama has now adopted a 460-page set of guidelines calling for “rigorous obedience to constitutional principles and guarantees.”³⁸ But David Shipler, another Times reporter, has dismissed recent headlines about the breaking of “lethal terrorist plots”, saying that they were in fact “dramas…facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training.”^[39]

Meanwhile there are no comparable moves towards curbing the NSA’s controversial data-mining of Americans, or the most illegal and counterproductive programs of all – the Special Forces killer squads and drone attacks, which in August 2012 killed a respected moderate Yemeni cleric, along with the al Qaeda representatives with whom he was negotiating.⁴⁰

The National Security Agency, America’s largest intelligence agency, is also one of its least supervised.

Even within government, there are increasing numbers of people who recognize that the secret powers of other agencies also need to be similarly brought back under legal control. But many congressional attempts to address the problem of state illegality can be considered to have actually aggravated it, by regularizing illegal practices in a statute. A prominent example was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012, which authorized the President, at his urging, to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely.⁴¹

What is needed instead is a redirection of the U.S. Government away from mania and illegality, such as that which ended the McCarthy era. But to so deal with the remaining illegalities of the Doomsday Mania, it will be helpful to understand their illegal origins in steps taken by J. Edgar Hoover, at first against explicit orders from his superiors, the Attorneys General. Though there is never any single cure to widespread social problems, it is high time, I believe, for a first step towards normalcy to be taken: to end the source of illegal powers, namely, the state of emergency proclaimed after 9/11. And to take that step I agree with Madison that we must understand how we got here: “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.”

Hooverism as the Source and the Model for Deep State Illegality

It is clear that human rights today are under attack, along with the constitution itself; yet there is no consensus on how to respond. Some, ranging from the Tea Party on the right to anarchists on the left, believe that the enemy is the state itself. Another group, which once included myself, have pointed to a slightly different and more vulnerable primary enemy -- not the state but what I have often referred to as the deep state, defined as all those powers not constitutionally or legally established that are driving the exercise of state power. One purpose of this essay is to define the American deep state more precisely, as the aggregate of informal and illegal powers assembled first by J. Edgar Hoover, and later augmented with the similar powers accumulated by the CIA and other covert agencies.

Having spent several years studying the historic origins of the American deep state, I would now like to propose a third, more limited target for activist reformers: not the powers of the deep state in themselves, but the abuse of these powers to override of the rule of law -- for the goal of American global dominance (including efforts to control the world’s petroresources).

I hope in this essay to distinguish between three markedly distinct uses and abuses of the deep state:

Hooverism: the use of the assembled powers of the deep state for conservative purposes, to preserve the status quo by neutralizing other forces threatening it from within;

McCarthyism: the use of the assembled powers of the deep state for radical purposes, to modify the status quo and effect political change;

Doomsday Mania: the wildly expanded use of the assembled powers of the deep state (as envisaged under the Doomsday Project), to suspend the status quo, and to liberate these powers for global dominance.

McCarthyism was a brief episode of collective mania in American history,

which ended as McCarthy himself became more and more a loose cannon out of control, demonstrably erratic in his behavior if not psychotic. Hooverism, in contrast, endured until shortly before Hoover’s death. For Hoover, who became a virtual dictator within his own fiefdom of the FBI, was at the same time externally constrained in his exercise of power. This was due largely to Truman’s antipathy to Hoover, which resulted in the allocation of foreign intelligence responsibilities to the CIA and OPC, blocking the strenuous efforts of Hoover, backed by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, to claim them for the FBI.

I consider the Doomsday Mania, as defined here, to be the major constitutional danger we face today to the American way of life. More than McCarthy ever did, it threatens traditional American politics, and indeed the constitution itself. I hope to show in this essay that its gross expansion of the random aggregation of deep powers assembled by Hoover, implemented in the panic and confusion immediately following 9/11 (and the subsequent mysterious anthrax attacks, another unsolved crime), has resulted in America now living under what Dana Priest has called “two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own.”⁴²

When I began this essay, it was to show that the domestic roots of the Doomsday Mania, including warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention (two major provisions of the Continuity of Government provisions) along with the enabling compliance of a suppressive governing media, all had their origins in measures taken on his own initiative by J. Edgar Hoover. I once identified Hooverism with McCarthyism,.⁴³ But I have come to see that the self-defeating excesses of McCarthyism quickly ended, whereas Hoover’s more restrained illegalities have survived, with modifications, until the present day.

Ellen Schrecker rightly reports that, “had observers known in the 1950s what they learned in the 1970s… ‘McCarthyism’ would probably be called 'Hooverism.’⁴⁴ For the FBI was the bureaucratic heart of the McCarthy era.”⁴⁵ She documents what is now widely known, that Hoover, through cutouts, was feeding McCarthy the information enabling him to grab public attention through televised hearings. “By the middle of 1953, however, Hoover had begun to worry that the senator’s growing recklessness might somehow compromise the Bureau and so he cut off the flow.”⁴⁶ Soon afterwards McCarthy was discredited – even more so as his alcoholism and other self-destructive traits became more obvious -- and he ceased to be a major influence in American politics.

The falling-out illustrated the fundamental difference between the two men’s uses of secret information. Hoover’s strategy was for most of his life to acquire it to maintain influence and control over others. McCarthy’s, in contrast, was to use it to expose and destroy others. But this was not the only or even the most important difference between the two men. I hope to show that Hoover’s overriding policy in using secret information was to maintain the status quo, in particular to prevent either left- or right-wing radicals from effecting fundamental change. By using secret information against other individuals and agencies more powerful than himself, McCarthy’s ambition (far more than Hoover’s) was to bring down Truman and members of his cabinet, to realign American politics, and to promote his own career to a higher level.

The literature about Hoover falls into two genres. On the one hand are those who point to his successful responses to a series of alarming events, dating from the terrorist bombings in 1919 to Stalin’s brutal repression of eastern Europe after World War II, the leakage of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the 1950 Korean War.⁴⁷ Hoover’s defenders, not all of them ex-FBI agents, point to the fact that, as the chief U.S. counterintelligence officer between the wars, Hoover had a better awareness than most Americans of the dangers presented to democracy by Stalinist spies.

On the other hand are those who point to Hoover’s role in amassing a system of secret powers that is now far more effective in controlling the public state, than the public state is in controlling its own secret agencies. This aggregation of a second layer of power independent, and often subversive of the formal institutions of state, has consolidated the influence in America of what I have called a “deep state;” and its control over other parts of government has intensified the characteristics of America as a “dual state.”

Hoover used his aggregation of secret powers to supplement and sustain what in his view was necessary to sustain public power⁴⁸. The strategic, long-term use of unchecked secret powers to override and supersede public power is what I mean by Doomsday Mania. In other words, we have seen in recent history an evolution of Hooverism, even after the death of Hoover, into an era of Doomsday Mania.

My essay will have much to say about Hoover’s illegalities, and how they, as well as and in sync with external enemies, have contributed to the conspicuous decline of American freedoms since 9/11. However I have come to accept that there are limits to legal politics, and that there are extreme instances when the state, to defend public order and civil liberties, must resort to its illegal resources to supplement its legal ones.

I shall illustrate what I mean by describing Hoover’s little-known use of organized crime to defeat a growing and murderous Klan insurrection in the 1960s, a potential race war that threatened to annihilate all of the peacefully achieved results of the civil rights movement in that era. In this instance, as opposed to his unconscionable COINTEL program for “neutralizing” Martin Luther King,⁴⁹ Hoover also used deep powers to protect the public state and some of its more enlightened policies.

It is difficult to extrapolate or draw conclusions from emergency situations. Specifically I do not believe one can use Hoover’s illegalities to justify the present erosion of human liberties in the misnamed and miswaged “war on terror.” It is important to distinguish between Hoover’s use of deep powers to protect the status quo, and the current redefinition of the status quo since 2001, along with the erosion of its constitutional restraints, perhaps permanently.

What is to be done? In concrete terms, the first steps are very simple. Congress must exercise its statutory responsibility to review the state of emergency that has been in existence since September 2011, with a view to its termination. And it must also review all of the secret Continuity of Government (COG) measures that have been implemented since 9/11, including warrantless surveillance and massive emergency detentions, in order to see which of these should also be terminated.

Our decayed political process is not close to achieving either of these goals. Most Americans are not even aware that we are in a state of emergency. The purpose of this essay is to help achieve the needed change in consciousness, by showing how secret changes, achieved illegally by Hoover, have contributed to our current democratic crisis.

And to begin with, I must challenge the prevailing mentality in the governing media, which dismisses this essay’s ensuing study of deep events as “conspiracy theory.” I shall begin with one of the examples of how the bureaucratic agendas of shadow bureaucracies have helped lead (probably unintentionally) to al Qaeda terror. This example is unfortunately far from unique.

How an FBI Decision Helped Set Up Al Qaeda Terror

In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terrorist named Essam Hafez Marzouk, a close ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada’s Vancouver Airport and was promptly detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A second terrorist named Ali Mohamed, “the primary U.S. intelligence agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden,” came to the airport to meet him; and, not finding him, made the mistake of asking about his friend at the Vancouver airport customs office. As a result the RCMP interrogated Ali Mohamed for two days, but finally released him, even though Ali Mohamed had clearly come in order to spirit a wanted terrorist into the United States.⁵⁰

If the RCMP had detained Ali Mohamed, who was much bigger game than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives might have been saved. After being released, Ali Mohamed went on to Nairobi. There in December 1993 he and his team photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then delivered the photos to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of 1998.⁵¹ Ali Mohamed later told an FBI agent that he also trained al Qaeda terrorists in how to hijack airplanes using box cutters.⁵²

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was unjustified, clearly had historic consequences, and may have contributed to 9/11. Yet the release was done for a bureaucratic reason: Ali Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone number of an FBI agent, John Zent, in the San Francisco FBI office, and told them, “If they called that number, the agent on the other end of the line would vouch for him.” As Ali Mohamed had predicted, Zent ordered his release.⁵³

Ali Mohamed was an important double agent, of major interest to more important U.S. authorities than Zent. Although Mohamed was at last arrested in September 1998 for his role in the Nairobi Embassy bombing, the USG still had not sentenced him in 2006; and he may still not have gone to jail.⁵⁴ The story of his release in Vancouver and its consequences is another example of the dangers of working with double agents. One can never be sure if the agent is working for his movement, for his agency, or – perhaps most likely – increasing his own power along with that of both his movement and his agency, by increasing violence in the world.⁵⁵

Mohamed’s release in Vancouver was a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable. A whole chapter in my book The Road to 9/11 was not enough to describe Mohamed’s intricate relationships with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, the murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, and finally the cover-up of 9/11 perpetrated by the 9/11 Commission and their witness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.⁵⁶

The release of Mohamed was remarkably similar to the later release of David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. authorities sent … to work for them in Pakistan…despite a warning [to both DEA and FBI] that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups.”¹⁴ Headley, who had been in a U.S. prison on narcotics charges, was released and sent to Pakistan as a DEA informant; but after contacting the ISI and agents of Lashkar-e-Taiba he went on to Pakistan and surveyed Mumbai for bombing targets on five occasions before the murderous terrorist attack of 2008 (much as Mohamed after his release had surveyed Nairobi).

The deep event is also an example of deep politics, a mixture of intrigue and suppression involving not just a part of the U.S. Government, but also the governing media. Let me say a bit more about the role of media suppression in the creation and preservation of deep events. To this day (according to a search of Lexis Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, well covered in Canada’s leading newspaper The Toronto Globe and Mail (December 22, 2001), has never been mentioned in any major American newspaper. Nor is there any surviving mention of it in the best mainstream book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA, after being cleared for publication by the FBI).⁵⁷

The U.S. press was similarly reticent in handling the DEA’s release and use of David Headley. Headley’s role as a DEA informant was at first acknowledged; but in 2011 U.S. reports of his co-defendant Tahawwur Rana’s Chicago trial, Headley’s DEA connection was treated as a mere allegation (or even speculation) of Rana’s defense counsel Charles Swift.⁵⁸

For the full story one had to go to the media of Britain, Canada, Australia, or Singapore.⁵⁹

In 1998, after the Embassy bombings, Mohamed was finally arrested. In the ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered a court affidavit (approved by Patrick Fitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouver incident as follows:

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) that he had provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in Afghanistan to a particular individual…. MOHAMED admitted that he had travelled to Vancouver, Canada, in the spring of 1993 to facilitate the entry of that individual into the United States…. MOHAMED further admitted that he and the individual had transported Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991…. MOHAMED told the RCMP that he was in the process of applying for a job as an FBI interpreter and did not want this incident to jeopardize the application. (In fact, MOHAMED then had such an application pending though he was never hired as a translator.)⁶⁰

Like the American media, this FBI affidavit suppressed the fact that Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handed with another known terrorist, was released on orders from the FBI.

The whole episode illustrates what has become all too common in recent American history, the way in which secret bureaucratic policies can take priority over the public interest, even to the point of leading to mass murder

 (since it contributed to the Embassy bombings). It is also an example of  what I mean by the two levels of history in America, We can refer to them as those historical facts officially acknowledged, and those facts officially suppressed; or alternatively as those facts fit to be mentioned in the governing media, and those suppressed by the same media. This leads in turn to two levels of historical narrative: official or archival history, which ignores or marginalizes deep events, and a second level – called deep history by its practitioners or “conspiracy theory” by its critics – which incorporates them. The method of deep political research is to recover deep events from this second level.

The collaboration in deep politics of forces outside the official or public state – which includes the mass media – has persuaded me reluctantly to use the concept of the deep state, and expand it to refer, not just to covert agencies, but also to the media and other controlling forces, both inside and outside the public state.

My intention is to focus on the second kind of events – those deep events either not discussed in the governing media or else referred to dismissively as the figments of “conspiracy theory.”

But first let us consider these deep events in a larger context. I believe that some deep events – such as 9/11, Watergate, and the JFK assassination -- are structural: they are not just a part of recent American history, but have significantly shaped it.

Deep Events and Deep Powers in Recent American History

There have been four interrelated and alarming trends in recent American history. The first is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its recent inclination to involve itself in needless, pernicious, and lengthy wars. The second, closely related, is the progressive shrinking of public politics and the rule of law as they are subordinated, even domestically, to the perceived requirements of covert U.S. operations abroad.

This can scarcely be separated from the third trend: the recent increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the .02 percent and the 99.8 percent. Although this is in a sense a revival of patterns characteristic of America’s Gilded Age in the 19^th century, it is not unrelated to America’s global expansion, the resulting weakening of American labor at home, and the huge contracts let out by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, often on a non-bidding basis.

The fourth, a factor underlying the other three, is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of what I have called structural deep events: events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, and 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have had consequences that enlarge the scope of covert government (placing it further beyond legal authority), and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.

I have come to believe that these structural deep events should be studied as part of a single process. I need this term to distinguish between two kinds of deep events. Some, like the U-2 incident in 1960 that led to cancelation of a proposed Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting, or the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 that was followed by overt U.S. war against North Vietnam, can be attributed to the workings of covert agencies within government. Important as these incidents were, they were less obviously structural: Tonkin Gulf led to a prolonged, unjust, and unneeded war, but it did not by itself instantly and permanently change the character of our government. In contrast, the John F. Kennedy assassination and (I believe) 9/11 involved complex machinations both inside and outside government, plots perhaps involving both the state and deep forces outside it.

In its origins the American deep state was no more than a milieu or arena of action involving three important areas beyond public consciousness: the underworld of organized crime, the overworld of wealthy persons and interests with contacts in organized crime, including both America’s old Protestant Ascendancy (as Burton Hersh has named it)⁶¹ and also America’s self-made new ascendancy (chiefly Catholic and Jewish) Finally it included the state itself, particularly the state’s semi-legal covert elements like the FBI and CIA with their special relationships to both underworld and overworld. In short, it was a widespread milieu of many relationships which are normally suppressed in the public consciousness and above all in the governing media. But the deep state slowly acquired more and more elements of coherence, as Hoover, over a period of decades, aggregated these various deep powers, legal and illegal, for his own purposes.

These normally suppressed relationships exist, and affect history; but they did not cohere until recently. Thus I will refer more often to deep powers and only sparingly to acts of the “deep state,” even then not so much to attribute blame to it as obliquely to exonerate the public state itself – much as we use the term “act of God,” not to blame God (still less to prove God’s existence), but obliquely, to indicate humans are not responsible. There are two kinds of deep powers referred to in this essay: both those that Hoover was able to use for his purposes and also those of others outside his realm of influence. In this essay we shall discuss almost exclusively the former.

The concept of a “deep state” is however useful in in all developed societies, because of the failure of the state to live up to Max Weber’s definition of it: as an entity which successfully “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."⁶² This is true even in a state with vast military power and no significant external security threat from another nation or group of nations.

As I studied the JFK assassination, I quickly recognized that Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, through his involvement with local prostitution (and allegedly drugs), had special relationships with organized crime in Chicago, Dallas, and Cuba, with wealthy oilmen and other members of the Dallas overworld (some of them friends of J. Edgar Hoover), and most significantly with the Dallas police.⁶³ All these relationships were “deep” in the sense that they were suppressed or downplayed by the Warren Commission in its report.

The Warren Report was systematic in its suppressions, in order to marginalize both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby as forces external to the American political system. For example, the Warren Commission reported their belief “that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”⁶⁴ They chose to suppress many credible reports that Ruby could secure Dallas police protection for high-level gambling and narcotics transactions; and they also chose not to transmit the discovery by one of their junior staff attorneys “that one of Ruby’s suspicious phone contacts, the convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, had phoned Dave Yaras [one of the Chicago nob’s most notorious assassins] the night before the assassination.”⁶⁵

Ruby’s relationships were not just local but international. Ruby, in a vain attempt to be interviewed by Earl Warren in Washington rather than Dallas, dropped the name of a mutual lawyer acquaintance, Alfred McLane; the name was so sensitive that the Warren Hearings in four instances never once spelled his last name correctly. Yet Warren immediately understood Ruby, and responded, “Alfred was killed in a taxi in New York” (5 WH 205-06).

McLane was general counsel for an oil company, Rimrock Tidelands, whose representative in New York, Santo Sorge, was listed in Congressional Hearings as “one of the most important [Sicilian] mafia leaders… probably [with] liaison duties between highest ranking Mafiosi in the United States and Italy.”⁶⁶ Mafia representatives are expert in government corruption, which may explain why Sorge’s paper company was able to obtain oil leases in Tunisia, leases then farmed out to legitimate development companies and ultimately to the oil majors.⁶⁷

The Role of Covert Agencies in Combating Deep Political Research

To my knowledge none of the hard facts in the preceding paragraphs is disputed. Nevertheless, these relationships are usually suppressed (perhaps because of their importance to the deep forces in our society). They were avoided altogether by the Warren Commission, and later perversely distorted by its successor, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which portrayed Ruby as a mobster, rather than as a connection between the mob and the Dallas police).

In like fashion the 9/11 Commission suppressed significant evidence in order to marginalize the alleged highjackers, and relied instead on virtually worthless testimony about al Qaeda obtained by torture.⁶⁸ For example, the 9/11 Report, relying on torture testimony, called torture victim Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) a ‘Bin Ladin lieutenant,’ [261] and an ‘al Qaeda lieutenant.’”[ 277], saying that he had been “a major figure in the [2000] millennium plots” [255].

All of this was subsequently questioned, and to date Zubaydah has never been charged with anything. In 2009 the Washington Post reported,

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources…. [O]ne former Justice Department official [said] “To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous."⁶⁹

In the same year the U.S. government itself, fighting Zubaydah’s motion for habeas corpus, explicitly chose not to contend “in this proceeding that Petitioner [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”^[70]

Anyone who even questions the governmental account of 9/11 earns the title “conspiracy theorist.” In the wake of 9/11 the U.S. Government website has, since 2005, supported various versions of a "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page, which still seeks to debunk “9/11 conspiracy theories;” and for a while attempted, unsuccessfully, to prove that “conspiracy theories” about Dallas were false.⁷¹

Since 1963 both the FBI and the CIA have taken steps to counter the efforts of critics to challenge the official story on Dallas.

For example, when Drew Pearson reported [correctly] that the FBI had interviewed Oswald [just] before the assassination, yet failed to warn the Secret Service about him, the FBI tried to silence the columnist…. The FBI even resorted to “dirty tricks” to suppress dissent over its conclusions. In February 1964, when Mark Lane was planning to present the case for a [second] grassy-knoll assassin before a public meeting at Town Hall in New York, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to prevent the meeting from taking place.⁷²

The CIA also took steps, not just to refute critics of the Warren Commission, but to discredit them. In 1967, for example, the CIA sent out to its stations a guidance memo, entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” which advised its officers to, among many other things, “point out…that the critics are…politically interested…financially interested…hasty and inaccurate in their research;”⁷³

*

The Source of Hoover’s Illicit Power: the FBI’s Intelligence Division

By the 1960s Hoover had become one of the most powerful political figures in America, thanks chiefly to his ability to use the FBI’s Investigative Division to intimidate, blackmail, or destroy the careers of those he deemed dangerous political dissidents.

Hoover had first exercised this power during the Red Scare of 1919, when, as head of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, he had without trial deported hundreds of aliens in the so-called Palmer Raids (along with Emma Goldman, who was arguably an American citizen).⁷⁴ Hoover had acted at times without consulting or informing President Wilson, in collaboration with a huge army of volunteer spies, the American Protective League, which had been organized by business executives.⁷⁵ Hoover did not by any means act alone: to help put down a national steel industry strike at this time, the U.S. army imposed martial law in certain areas.⁷⁶

One should acknowledge that Hoover himself briefly played a different role, professionalizing the Bureau of Investigation, and accepting for about a decade the directive given him by Attorney General Harlan Stone on May 13, 1924: “The activities of the Bureau are to be limited strictly to investigations of violations of law.”^[77] Although he had been a major player in the Palmer Raids of 1919-20, Hoover now dismantled his Investigative Division (for over a decade), concentrated on solving personal crimes already committed, such as bank robberies, and never again involved the Bureau in anything like the Palmer Raids. On the contrary, in 1941 he was a leading opponent within the government of the decision (which originated with a local Army field     commander) to round up and intern Japanese Americans.⁷⁸  This wholesale internment program overrode Hoover’s own proposal for the selective detention of those Japanese already identified on the FBI’s Custodial Detention list (described below). It represented, in effect, an unexpected Army rebuff to Hoover.

Instead, the Bureau of Investigation, which in 1935 became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pursued bootleggers, bank robbers and other gangsters, from John Dillinger to Al Capone. Non-criminal intelligence files on the general public only became the hallmark of the FBI after 1936, when Roosevelt told Hoover he was interested in “’obtaining a broad picture’ of the Communist and Fascist movements” in America.”⁷⁹

Roosevelt was responding to a troubling message from Hoover about American right-wing activity at the highest level. In 1935 Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler reported to Hoover that he had been approached by two representatives of Wall Street to lead a right-wing coup d’état against President Roosevelt. Curt Gentry writes that “Hoover informed Butler that since there was no evidence that a federal criminal statute had been violated, he did not have the authority to order an investigation.”⁸⁰ We see here a key to Hoover’s political astuteness: his refusal ever to involve himself in disputes among those whose power was equal to or greater than his own. (We see this again in his refusal, for years, to involve the FBI in the investigation of either organized crime or the international drug traffic.)

However Hoover sought and obtained authority from FDR to reestablish his Investigative Division, after a second report from General Butler: that the indigenous American Fascist, Father Charles Coughlin, had “approached General Butler and urged him to lead an armed expedition into Mexico, its purpose to oppose the Cárdenas government and restore the church.”⁸¹

This time Hoover reported Butler’s information to Roosevelt; and obtained from the president, on August 24, 1936, a verbal go-ahead to conduct investigations on a wide range of domestic political activities, right and left.⁸² With this go-ahead, Hoover reestablished an Intelligence Division, which eventually evolved into the source of his power over others, including law-abiding Americans.⁸³ According to Marc Aronson,

That secret conversation was the moment when Hoover’s life story changed American history. He was given real authority to protect the nation, which he slowly but surely transformed into the right to play by his own rules, even if that totally undermined the laws and principles of the democracy he was protecting.⁸⁴

Because no law or written document had conferred this power on him, Hoover was free to rely increasingly on illegal methods to collect intelligence, ranging from bugs, mail-openings and wiretaps to break-ins.⁸⁵ He knew very well that information gathered illegally could not be used in prosecutions. But Hoover’s aim was to use information, not for prosecution, but to intimidate and control all sectors of society, especially those with other forms of power.

His method of dealing with Father Coughlin is a good example of this.

Hoover kept a sharp eye on the outspoken priest, who by 1940 was probably America’s most powerful pro-Nazi anti-Semite, with a radio show reaching possibly thirty million listeners. In January 1940 the FBI raided an office of the Christian Front, a group supported by Coughlin, for plotting to overthrow the government. Two years later Coughlin was silenced and his radio show went off the air.

Coughlin’s subsequent silence, which lasted for decades, is usually attributed to an order from his bishop, after a deal negotiated with Attorney General Biddle.⁸⁶ But after Coughlin’s death in 1979, his psychiatrist revealed that what silenced the priest had not been

sudden obedience to his bishop, whom he had successfully defied for several years. That cover story was circulated in May 1942 by church authorities…. Coughlin felt the effects of… J. Edgar Hoover [who] had proof of Coughlin’s homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in the verbal exchange between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufficient to silence Coughlin’s public voice until May 24, 1972…. Hoover had died just three weeks earlier, on May 2, 1972.⁸⁷

Hoover’s silencing of Coughlin demonstrates that he used his intelligence files, not just against the left, but against any force threatening the somewhat corrupt status quo maintained by his own secret powers.

Armed in 1936 with Roosevelt’s verbal authorization, Hoover proceeded to amass a list of files on tens of thousands of Americans. He was not timid in selecting targets. In 1946, bypassing Attorney General Tom Clark whom he knew would be disapproving, Hoover reported in a memo to Truman via George Allen, a wealthy businessman who was a friend, that “There is an enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington,” including “a number of high officials” – specifically including undersecretary of state Dean Acheson and former assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy.⁸⁸

When Truman proved uninterested in Hoover’s dire warnings, Hoover turned instead to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), sharing his files above all with two selected spokesmen, young Congressman Richard Nixon of HUAC in 1947, and later Senator Joseph McCarthy of the SISS in 1950.⁸⁹ Armed with information from Hoover to capture headlines, first Nixon and later Ronald Reagan were launched into careers of public prominence that led them to the White House.⁹⁰ Both men, in different ways, would then contribute to the further institutionalization of the covert intelligence powers first developed by Hoover.

Hoover eventually collected information on all those with political influence, from members of Congress to the very wealthy; and he retained personal control over this information in his files to protect his position. For example he reportedly had

343 closely held case files on the business activities of Joseph P. Kennedy, starting with the bootlegging years and including coverage of several illegal – treasonous, even – transactions brought off while Kennedy was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James.⁹¹

By all accounts, Hoover’s wealth of such information is what enabled him to retain his office as Director for life, and perhaps influence other major political decisions.⁹²

Hoover’s Powers and the Strengthening of the American Dual State

The election of Eisenhower in 1952 enhanced Hoover’s status in Washington, and also that of his projects.

Hoover’s men… oversaw internal security purges throughout the government, destroying lives and careers over suspicions of disloyalty or homosexuality…. With the full backing of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an FBI agent [personally approved by Hoover] named R.W. “Scott” McLeod took a job as internal security chief at State. His political purges of Washington and embassies and consulates overseas used FBI methods, including wiretaps, to force liberal and suspected leftists out of the foreign service.⁹³

Between May 1953 and June 1955 only 8 persons were dismissed as security risks but 273 submitted their resignations…. The result was a self-censorship which undoubtedly had an effect on American foreign policy, few daring to express their opinions freely for fear they would be accountable to McLeod and, eventually, McCarthy, with whom he shared the findings of his investigations. Through McLeod and his cadre, Hoover was tapped into every part of the State Department. Aides say he knew many of [John Foster] Dulles’s decisions even before the president did.⁹⁴

The victims particularly affected were old “China hands,” like John Paton Davies, who had offended the China Lobby by their negative assessments of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT.

Thus was officially instituted a system whereby one part of government, the FBI, gained the power to install its agents in another, for the purpose of affecting its policies by purging its personnel. The resulting demoralization and reorientation of State long outlasted the fall of McCarthy. It led to two decades of unreal China policy, accompanied by a long-lasting inability of State to oppose reckless CIA and Pentagon escalations of anticommunist violence in Southeast Asia. State Department veteran James C. Thomson, after resigning in 1966 over the Vietnam War, wrote an important article blaming America’s errors and failures in Southeast Asia on the purging of expertise in the McCarthy era, along with Democratic Party remembrance of the "loss of China" charges.⁹⁵

Criticizing this state of affairs from the perspective of someone who had witnessed the SS purges in Nazi Germany, political science professor Hans Morgenthau in 1955 deplored the condition of a similar “dual state” in America, in which the “authorities charged by law” were subordinated to a hostile right-wing clique with “an effective veto over the decisions of the former.”⁹⁶

Swedish professor Ola Tunander, expanding on Morgenthau’s critique, called the second state a “deep state.”⁹⁷ Following him in 2007 and 2008, I also defined the deep state somewhat restrictively, as an unrepresentative “restricted locus of top-down power,” or as a parallel structure or “hard-edged coalition,” consisting primarily of the covert agencies (like the CIA) that are “responsive…to the overworld, but with little or no other public constituency.”⁹⁸

I now use the term “deep state” for the larger aggregation of extralegal powers inside and outside government that Hoover helped consolidate, including not just covert agencies like the FBI but also their media allies and other allied elements both in the wealthy overworld and the criminal underworld. In short my “deep state” is roughly the “deep political system” I defined in 1993 as “one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society.”⁹⁹ Since 1963 this system has included at least some elements responsible for covering up the assassination of a president.

Hoover and the Emergence of America’s Controlled Governing Media

Hoover also played an important role in the 1950s conversion of America’s major media into a relatively consolidated Orwellian transmitter of official propaganda. It is not fashionable to speak of the so-called mainstream media (MSM) this way. The media themselves like to point to apparent exceptions, such as the role of journalism in leading to America’s disenchantment with the Vietnam War, and above all in unseating a sitting president in the Watergate crisis.

Yet these very examples prove, on closer examination, to have been no exceptions at all. The full story of Watergate is far from understood; yet it is  conceded now that a major source for the stories that in 1974 brought down Nixon was Mark Felt, then the Associate Director and highest permanent agent in the FBI.¹⁰⁰ In other words Felt was merely perpetuating a practice of controlled leaks that had been practiced for years by Hoover. The media turn against the Vietnam War occurred chiefly in 1968, when many in the USG, including the “Wise men” under Clark Clifford whom LBJ appointed to advise him, had decided that the search for a victory in Vietnam was no longer in America’s strategic or financial best interests.¹⁰¹

The Orwellian silencing of the American media is best illustrated by comparing them with the British. In theory America is constitutionally committed to a free press, whereas the British press is guided by a system of Defence Advisory Notices, disregard of which can lead to prosecution under the UK Official Secrets Act.^[102] But in practice it has become notorious that scandals involving both countries are regularly broken in the United Kingdom, with the American media following belatedly if at all.

Take for example, the so-called “Manning memorandum” on a top secret meeting about Iraq of January 2003 in the Oval Office between George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The memo, still largely unknown in the U.S., was finally reported by the New York Times on March 27, 2006:

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.¹⁰³

This was almost two months after the news-making memo had been first reported in three British newspapers, along with Channel Four TV.¹⁰⁴ For years afterwards the memo story continued to make headlines in the British, Australian, and New Zealand newspapers, but from a review of Lexis-Nexis I can find no other reports of it in the major newspapers of the United States or Canada.¹⁰⁵

I should add that the Orwellian behavior of the U.S. governing has included not only suppression of the truth, but the propagation of lies. In the 1950s, when CIA operations in Southeast Asia were partly financed by proceeds from the KMT-controlled drug traffic, the U.S. routinely parroted the false claims of Harry Anslinger, chief of the federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), that KMT drugs reaching America via Bangkok and Hong Kong were coming instead from Communist China.¹⁰⁶ (Anslinger “had established a working relationship with the CIA by the early 1950s.”)¹⁰⁷

In a major FBN bust in 1959, for example,

The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Anti-Communist League (a KMT front) had been ordered by the US consulate in Hong Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way Fong became no more than an unindicted conspirator, and the KMT disappeared from view; [George] White then told the US press that the heroin had come from Communist China (“most of it from a vast poppy field near Chungking”).¹⁰⁸

(FBN official George White was simultaneously a CIA operative.)

The FBN propaganda line on Asian opium, which effectively protected the pro-KMT societies distributing it in America, went essentially unchallenged in the US press until the 1970s, when Nixon began revising U.S. policy towards China. In the 1980s the press would similarly unite to transmit government lies protecting the major cocaine traffickers and distributors who were simultaneously supporting Reagan’s Contra army in Nicaragua.¹⁰⁹ And in the 1990s when Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Gary Webb showed how major cocaine dealers supporting the Contras were allowed to traffic with impunity, the major media united to destroy his career, in what Alexander Cockburn called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults…in living memory.”¹¹⁰

It would of course be foolish to blame Hoover, rather than the CIA, for this particular propaganda line. We now know quite a lot about the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird: its extensive program, or “mighty Wurlitzer,” to influence American media beginning in the 1950s.¹¹¹ But the CIA’s manipulations of the press built upon a governing media that had already been conditioned by Hoover to serve the alleged needs of national security.

A key event in this conditioning was the extended media drama of the Alger Hiss case and the Pumpkin Papers, in which the on-stage performance of young Richard Nixon was backstopped by Hoover.¹¹²

The evidence suggests that Hoover’s careful cultivation of the media, together with the information he had gathered on journalists and above all Congressmen, made him, more than any other individual, responsible for the manipulability of the U.S. media. This is well illustrated by Hoover’s ability, in the summer of 1963, to first leak details of John F. Kennedy’s sex life, and then gain influence over the Kennedy White House by intervening to see that his own leak was squelched.

In the same summer of 1963 the British press was obsessed with the Christine Keeler sex scandal, a complex story of a prostitution ring where one of a call girl’s johns had been Secretary of War John Profumo, and another a suspected Soviet spy. The scandal led inexorably to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in October 1963.

Hoover became aware in July 1963 of a potential parallel scandal in America: that JFK had had sex with Ellen Rometsch, the wife of an East German army sergeant who was already being investigated by the FBI as a possible spy.¹¹³ This was at a particularly delicate moment in the president’s relations with the FBI director.

Ellen Rometsch

On June 10, the president had spoken at American University, calling for a fresh approach to US-Soviet relations, and one day later he had gone on TV to call for a Civil Rights Act. Bobby Kennedy was under increasing pressure from Hoover to authorize the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, And on July 2 a Virginia newspaper had written in an editorial (which soon reached FBI files) that “Bobby and his big brother want to retire J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director and bring in a young man who will eagerly turn the respected agency into an enforcement arm [for] the civil rights legislative package.”¹¹⁴

All of these potential changes were of concern to Hoover, and none more than the last. He had his proven ways of responding. According to Anthony Summers, “As the Kennedys wrestled with the mounting civil rights crisis, Edgar quietly opened a new file code-named ‘Bowtie.’” Dealing with the Keeler scandal in Britain, the file contained reports that JFK had had sex with two members of the Keeler sex ring, Suzy Chang and Maria Novotny, who were considered possible security risks. The file, now partly viewable on line, shows that on June 19 “Mr. DeLoach [Hoover’s assistant director for press relations] has talked to the [New York] Journal American regarding [deleted].”¹¹⁵ Four days later, on June 23, Dorothy Kilgallen published an article in the Journal-American: "One of the biggest names in American politics - a man who holds a very high elective office - has been injected into Britain's vice-security scandal."¹¹⁶ Bobby Kennedy squelched that story, allegedly by threatening the paper’s owner with an anti-trust lawsuit.

But the pressures continued. On October 26, a story by Clark Mollenhoff reported that Rometsch had been expelled from the country, after “attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.”

Clark Mollenhoff …was one of Edgar’s “friendly” reporters. His article added that Senator John Williams…”had obtained an account” of Rometsch’s activity. It would later emerge that the Senator had come into possession of documents from the FBI, a leak that only Edgar could have approved.¹¹⁷

The article added that Williams intended to present his information to the Senate body already investigating the host of the Rometsch parties, former Senate aide Bobby Baker.

Now the Kennedy brothers were facing a crisis not just in the press but in Congress. Bobby dealt with it by going as a supplicant to Hoover, the man who (in the words of Taylor Branch), “more than any other person, had the power to determine whether the Rometsch affair stayed as quiet as [Inga] Arvad [an early JFK mistress, who allegedly had also slept with Adolf Hitler] or became as noisy as the Profumo scandal in England.”^[118] Burton Hersh agrees: “Only he, Hoover, could be depended on to have the clout… to expunge the whole matter from the Rules Committee’s agenda.”¹¹⁹ Hoover dealt with the crisis by a secret meeting with the two party leaders in the Senate, Mansfield and Dirksen.

The Bobby Baker inquiry continued without reference to Rometsch, and the U.S. media produced no sensational sex scandal like England’s. As Michael Beschloss reports,

As a result of Hoover’s meeting with the two Senators…Rometsch’s relationship with the President remained a national secret. FBI agents stormed the office of a congressional photographer, confiscating prints and negatives of the German woman. The President and his brother acquired one more unwanted debt to Hoover.¹²⁰

But the relationship of the Kennedys to Hoover was now far more subordinate than before. Bobby promptly issued four wiretaps on Martin Luther King that Hoover had long wanted. And by reporting to Bobby about “a rumor circulating on the Hill that I was being replaced…predicated upon the fact that I had not issued a statement adjudicating the Bobby Baker affair,” Hoover prompted Bobby to dismiss the rumors as “unfounded and vicious.”¹²¹

The whole episode illustrated dramatically how the U.S. press was not just the CIA’s Wurlitzer, but Hoover’s as well – on the very eve of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath, reinforcing two levels of history, one level researched only by “conspiracy theorists.”

On another level, it illustrates the importance of the organized sex business and organized crime in reinforcing the influence of deep powers over public politicians, not just in the case of the Kennedys, but also in the Koreagate sex scandal of 1976, and allegedly in Watergate as well.¹²²

Find the second half of this essay here. 

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "America's Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover's Illegal Powers," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013.

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• Jeremy Kuzmarov, Police Training, “Nation Building” and Political Repression in Postcolonial South Korea

• Peter Dale Scott, The NATO Afghanistan War and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War

• Peter Dale Scott, The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

• Peter Dale Scott, Norway's Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites

• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents

Notes

¹ As reported by FBI Special Agent Arthur Murtagh, in Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 376; citing Pike Report, Pt 3, 1968.

² April 1887 letter to the Anglican Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton; in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 364.

³ Brian Fitzgerald, McCarthyism: The Red Scare (Minneapolis, Minn.: Compass Point Books, 2007), 16.

⁴ Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy,”

Japan Focus, January 24, 2011, link.

⁵ Patrick A. Thronson, “Toward Comprehensive Reform of America’s Emergency Law Regime,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 46, No. 2, Winter 2013, 737.

⁶ See “How the Anti-Terrorism Bill Allows for Detention of People Engaging in Innocent Associational Activity,” ACLU, October 23, 2001, link.

⁷ Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 390. As we shall see below, Mitchell blocked implementation of the Huston Plan at the urging of Hoover, who was opposed to such cooperation between the FBI and CIA.

⁸ Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book II - Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (henceforth Church Committee, Book II), 91. For whatever reason, The Church Committee Report is silent about the detention provisions of the Huston Plan (loc. cit., 112-15).

⁹ Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War consensus: the political economy of U.S. national security policy, 1949-51 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 153: “Title II of the act authorized the arrest and detention of suspected subversives in the event of an ‘internal security emergency.’”

¹⁰ See e.g. Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 99-100; Paul D. Borman, “The Selling of Preventive Detention 1970,” Northwest Law Review, 65 (January-February 1971), 879-931.

¹¹ Athan Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A Comprehensive Guide (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 158. We shall see below (at footnote 131) that Hoover had never been constrained by the procedures of the Internal Security Act when it was passed.

¹² As we shall see below (at footnote 127) the new Administrative Index (ADEX). was in turn discontinued in 1978.  But the list was again not destroyed, and remained available for use by a committee of Continuity of Government (COG) planners (including Rumsfeld and Cheney) in the new Reagan Administration. It has been in active use since 9/11.

¹³ In three magisterial books (Blowback, Nemesis, and Dismantling the Empire) Chalmers Johnson documented how America’s imperial overstretch abroad has become a threat to the republic itself. This essay looks at a parallel threat to the republic that has arisen from within.

¹⁴ See Mark Perry, Eclipse: The Last Days of the CIA (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 47-49, 319-320; Gregory F, Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987); David Aaron, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-18/books/bk-15321_1_covert-action: “CIA Director William Casey, angry at his experts on terrorism for coming up with little evidence linking the Soviet Union to terror groups, ordered them to read Claire Sterling's famous book "The Terror Network." They did and found that virtually all of the examples she cited turned out to be CIA disinformation--false stories planted in the foreign press that she unwittingly used in good faith.”

¹⁵ April 1887 letter to the Anglican Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton; in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 364.

¹⁶ McCarthy’s “certain manic brilliance” was noted at the time by commentator Eric Sevareid (Conrad Black, Richard Milhous Nixon: the invincible quest [London: Quercus, 2007], 310). Cf. Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals, the French Revolution, the struggle for modernity, and the origins of ideological terror (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 328: “Richard Nixon…manifested many attributes that can accurately be called ‘paranoid.’ But when the Watergate crisis came to its frightful climax, many sensitive, thoughtful people in Washington were fearful that the president would go over the line and move on from paranoid behavior to paranoia itself. In the last days before Nixon resigned, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger apparently informed all U.S. commanders that any orders from the White House concerning troops or weapons had to be approved by him, before being executed.”

¹⁷ For Angleton as “the CIA’s manic molehunter,” see Lori Lyn Bogle (ed.) The Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 64. For North’s “nearly manic devotion to duty” see Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York : Oxford University, 1992), 153. Cf. Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press), 135: “Rumsfeld … in the judgment of his non-admirers…gave off a manic and scary vibe.”

¹⁸ Likewise Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s fellow Vulcan, Paul Wolfowitz, after leaving the Pentagon, was forced out of his position as president of the World Bank because of similar hubristic excesses, such as granting his mistress salary raises far in excess of those allowable under Bank rules. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were ousted after successful revolts by their own subordinates. For Rumsfeld’s downfall after “the revolt of the generals” against his “reign of terror,” see Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), especially 210-23.

¹⁹ Peter Dale Scott. “Northwards without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power,” Social Justice, Summer 1989; reprinted as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011, link. I offer the notion of personal power autointoxication as a more personalized and more sympathetic interpretation of the phenomenon increasingly described by some criminologists as “state criminality.” See e.g. G. Barak, “Crime, criminology and human rights: Towards an understanding of state criminality,” Journal of Human Justice, 1990; Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist (February, 2010), 795-825. Some of my critique of “state crimes” analysis can be found in "Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, September 23, 2012, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3835.

²⁰  Our economy’s recent recurrent flux between exaggerated bubble (moving in Alan Greenspan’s terms from “irrational exuberance” to “infectious greed”) and then recession, has been compared by a psychologist to “the cycle of manic depression” (Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough [New York: W.W. Norton, 2005], 127).

²¹ Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy,”

Japan Focus, January 24, 2011, link.

²² Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine, Mar-Apr 1992, 26.

²³ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 185-87; citing Executive order 12656 of 18 November 1988.

²⁴ Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), 88; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 187.

²⁵ CNN, November 17, 1991, quoted in Shirley Anne Warshaw, The Co-presidency of Bush and Cheney [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Politics and Policy, 2009], 162.

²⁶ The xenophobia of the 18^th century was of course perpetuated in the nativist movements such as the Know-Nothings in the 19^th Century and the anti-Bilderberg right today; see David Harry. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (New York: Vintage, 1990). Some historians, notably Richard Hofstadter, have analyzed McCarthyism itself as a replication of 19^th century nativist populism (Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (Harper’s Magazine, November 1964), 77-86, link). But to understand McCarthyism, both then and now, this paper will focus on the extent to which McCarthy’s fear tactics were both inspired and guided from above, and principally by Hoover.

²⁷ John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

²⁸ Described below in this essay. Cf. Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2006), 32-40; Sidney Blumenthal. “The long march of Dick Cheney,” Salon, November 24, 2005; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 51-54.

²⁹ Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 314; citing The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1950), XXX. 348.

³⁰ Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ENDGAME: Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan, 2003-2012, 11; link; cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 240. This document was removed from the DHS website after I and others reported on it, but is readable on line in its original form.

³¹ The massive internment and relocation of Japanese-Americans was a program initiated by the U.S. Army, not Hoover. On the other hand Hoover, at FDR’s direction, began covert surveillance of Axis nationals in Latin-American countries. More than four thousand ethnic German civilians were ultimately deported to the United States where most were interned in detention camps. See Heidi Donald, We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2007).

³² Glenn Greenwald, “Three key lessons from the Obama administration's drone lies,” Guardian (London), April 11, 2013, here. Cf. Micah Zenko, “An Inconvenient Truth: Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars,” Foreign Policy, Aril 11, 2013, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/10/an_inconvenient_truth_drones#.UWXow7ir6Xk.twitter.

³³ William Binney, quoted in Jane Mayer, “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” New Yorker, May 23, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all.

³⁴ “Even as some senior former American security officials question whether the strikes are beginning to do more harm than good, 65 percent of Americans questioned in a Gallup poll last month approved of strikes to kill suspected foreign terrorists; only 28 percent were opposed” (Shane, “Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror, New York Times, April 8, 2013, 3). As in the McCarthy era, public xenophobia is trumping common sense. See Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior--and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), described as “a groundbreaking clinical, neuropsychological, and practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds, and to the very biology of our brains.”

³⁵ See e.g. Tom Engelhardt, “The Enemy-Industrial Complex,”TomDispatch, April 15, 2013,

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175687/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_cathedral_of_the_enemy/:

“All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror."  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.” Engelhardt accurately blames this psychotic condition on neocons, who “they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.” But his trenchant essay ends of a note of gloom, even despair: “They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  ….  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they. The comic strip character Pogo once famously declared: ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’ How true. We just don’t know it yet.”

³⁶ Weiner, Enemies, 443. A classified U.S. intelligence report of around 2006 concluded that Iraq had become a “cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement” (Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth [New York: Penguin Press, 2013], 138).

³⁷ The counter-productivity is of course welcome to those who profit from the American war machine, as well as to those multinational corporations who welcome an American military presence around the globe. See Peter Dale Scott, "Why Americans Must End America's Self-Generating Wars," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 26, 2012, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3819.

³⁸ FBI manual quoted in Weiner, Enemies, 447-48.

³⁹ David K. Shipler, “Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.” New York Times,

April 28, 2012, link. Cf. Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2013). Cf. Rick Perlstein, “How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook,” Rolling Stone, May 15, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515.

⁴⁰ Robert W. Worth, Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, “Drone Strikes’ Risks to Get Rare Moment in the Public Eye,” New York Times, February 5, 2013, link. On CIA and JSOC killer squads in general, see Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife.

⁴¹ Jonathan Turley, “The NDAA's historic assault on American liberty,” Guardian (London), January 2, 2012: “The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking…. On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.”

⁴² Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

⁴³ Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 310-11; cf. David Alan Scherer, The Dawn of Hooverism: J. Edgar Hoover His Impact and Legacy Upon McCarthyism (dissertation, Simmons College, Boston, 2011).

⁴⁴ This is a welcome corrective to the efforts of Richard Hofstadter, David Caute, and others to depict McCarthyism as an example of populist paranoia. See above, footnote 18.

⁴⁵ Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998), 203.

⁴⁶ Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 215-16; cf. Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 139.

⁴⁷  Anne Applebaum, in an important recent book, has reminded us how brutal and alarming was Stalin’s repression in Eastern Europe (Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 [New York: Doubleday, 2012]).

⁴⁸ This does not mean that Hoover was politically neutral or objective. His long-time preference for and aid to pro-FBI right-wing politicians like Ronald Reagan is well documented by Seth Rosenfeld (Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012]). But unlike the Doomsday planners he worked within the political system (with all of its corrupt and even criminal elements), not to supplant it by a shadow government. I’d be surprised if this distinction held up well.

⁴⁹ Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993), 353.

⁵⁰ Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI -- and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 123-25. Cf. Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001; Weiner, Enemies, 397.

⁵¹ Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.

⁵² J.M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,” Intelwire, link: “Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda's terrorist infrastructure in the United States -- a series of connections, ideas, techniques and specific tools used by the [9/11] plot's hijackers and masterminds….  Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.”

⁵³ Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.

⁵⁴ Soufan, The Black Banners, 561.

⁵⁵ “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Scott, American War Machine, 246-47.  Cf. The Globe and Mail (Canada), May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.” Another much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24, etc.).

⁵⁶ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151-60. For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists," Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578.

⁵⁷ Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan's case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA. The PRB's [Publications Review Board’s] authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for public disclosure ‘either during my employment . . . or at anytime thereafter.’" In other words, the CIA’s PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan’s book, but did so anyway – an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic distinctions in today’s shadow state.

⁵⁸ E,g, Sebastian Rotella, “Key witness ties Pakistan's spy agency to terror group,” Washington Post, May 24, 2011: “In his opening statement, Rana's attorney argued that Headley had manipulated Rana just as he had manipulated multiple wives, extremist groups and government agencies. Charles Swift also raised the possibility that Headley may have continued working for the U.S. government well after he started training with Lashkar.” This is the closest Rotella came to mentioning the role of the DEA in releasing Headley at all. One day earlier, in the London Guardian of May 23, the same Sebastian Rotella wrote much more directly that “Headley is a former informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).” Cf. Sebastian Rotella, “Feds Confirm‎ Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While Working for DEA,” ProPublica, Oct. 16, 2010, link: “Federal officials acknowledged Saturday that David Coleman Headley, the U.S. businessman who confessed to being a terrorist scout in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was working as a DEA informant while he was training with terrorists in Pakistan.”

⁵⁹ E.g. Toronto Globe and Mail, May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.”

⁶⁰ Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint, United States of America v Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, September 1998 (obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7, link-facebook.

⁶¹ Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 67. The term is aptly borrowed from Irish history.

⁶² Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1991), 78.

⁶³ Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 204-06.

⁶⁴ Warren Report, 801.

⁶⁵ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 131-33 (narcotics), 204-06 (gambling), 163 (Yaras).

⁶⁶ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 202-04; citing U.S. Congress, Senate, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Hearings (1964), 997; Seth Kantor, Who Was Jack Ruby? (New York: Everest House, 1978),12.

⁶⁷ Scott, Deep Politics, and the Death of JFK 204; citing World Petroleum, February 1964.

⁶⁸ For the 9/11 Commission Report and Marginalization, see Peter Dale Scott, “9/11 as a Deep Event: How CIA Personnel Helped Allow It To Happen,” in James R Gourley, ed., The 9/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001 (Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 109-28; Kevin Fenton. Disconnecting the Dots: How 9/11 Was Allowed to Happen (Eugene, OR: Trine Day, 2011).

⁶⁹ Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, “Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” Washington Post, March 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032802066.html.

⁷⁰ “Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn v. Robert Gates, Respondents Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Petitioner’s Motion for Discover and Petitioner’s Motion for Sanctions. Civil Action No. 08-cv-1360 (RWR), September 2009.;” quoted by Kevin Ryan, “Abu Zubaydah Poses a Real Threat to Al Qaeda,”

WashingtonsBlog, October 25, 2012, check it.

⁷¹ In 2010 the State Department appointed Todd Leventhal “Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State” (link) and “launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories….The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page… insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11” Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010. When last consulted in 2012 the claim that Oswald “acted alone” remained, but the supporting page had been suspended (cf. link). The site now links to essays by private authors, beginning with John Ray, described as “a sophomore decision science major at Carnegie-Mellon University.”

⁷² Scott, Deep Politics, 45 (with supporting details).

⁷³ CIA Dispatch of April 1, 1967, NARA # 104-10138-10379: reproduced at http://www.namebase.org/foia/jfk01.html.

⁷⁴ Weiner, Enemies, 24-25, 29, 31.

⁷⁵ Weiner, Enemies, 15-16.

⁷⁶ Weiner, Enemies, 28.

⁷⁷ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 127.

⁷⁸ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 244-45.

⁷⁹ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 207. However Hoover had already begun to violate Stone’s edict by 1933, when he began to collect "derogatory information" on Alfred Einstein (Fred Jerome, The Einstein file: J. Edgar Hoover's secret war against the world's most famous scientist [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002], jacket; link) and 1934, when on FDR’s urging he ordered what he termed a “so-called intelligence investigation” of pro-Nazi elements, primarily the German-American Bund (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 205).

⁸⁰ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 204. Cf. Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007); Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 200-01.

⁸¹ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 205.

⁸² Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 51; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 206-08; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book II - Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (henceforth Church Committee, Book II), 30.

⁸³ Hoover first named the revived Division Five of the FBI as the Security Division, then the Domestic Intelligence Division, and then the Intelligence Division.

⁸⁴ Marc Aronson, Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies

 (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2012), 85. Aronson erroneously attributes FDR’s authorization to the first Butler contact with Hoover, instead of the second.

⁸⁵ “Intelligence Division operations were cloaked in secrecy; were less accountable to public scrutiny…and spilled over into unethical or illegal conduct. Coexisting with the professional culture of the criminal division was a ‘counterculture’ that developed in the hidden side of the Bureau’s intelligence operations” (Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A Comprehensive Guide, 183).

⁸⁶ Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life Of The Priest Of The Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 216ZZ.

⁸⁷ A.S. Richard Sipe, The Serpent and the Dove: Celibacy in Literature and Life (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 44-45.

⁸⁸ Weiner, Enemies, 144; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 350n. Cf. Kai Bird, The Chairman, 281.

⁸⁹ Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 64-65; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 378-80.

⁹⁰ For Hoover’s role in shaping Reagan’s political career, see Rosenfeld, Subversives.

⁹¹ Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 15.

⁹² Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012), 291. Burton Hersh believes the allegation that LBJ used information from Hoover to secure his position on the 1960 Democratic ticket (Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 15-16).

⁹³ Weiner, Enemies, 179-80. McLeod’s staff also consisted mostly of former FBI agents, using extralegal techniques such as “surveillances, mail openings, wiretaps, and break-ins” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 408-09). McLeod’s office was established during the Eisenhower administration by Presidential Executive Order 10450 of April 27, 1953.

⁹⁴ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 409.

⁹⁵ James C. Thomson,  “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,” Atlantic Monthly, April, 1968, link. Cf. Christopher Gerard, "On the Road to Vietnam: 'The Loss of China Syndrome,' Pat McCarran, and J. Edgar Hoover," Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 37 [1994].

⁹⁶ Hans Morgenthau, "The Corruption of Patriotism," New Republic, 1955; reprinted in Hans Morgenthau (ed.) Politics in the Twentieth Century, I, 407. Cf. Eric Wilson (ed.) The Dual State: Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012), 1-3, 21-27, etc.

⁹⁷ Ola Tunander, “Democratic State versus Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West,” Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 56-72.

⁹⁸ Scott, The Road to 9/11, 252, 258; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 15-16; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 21.

⁹⁹ Scott, Deep Politics, xi-xii; discussion in Eric Wilson, “The Concept of the Parapolitical,” in Wilson (ed.), The Dual State, 1-27.

¹⁰⁰ David von Drehle, “FBI’s No. 2 Was ‘Deep Throat’: Mark Felt Ends 30-Year Mystery of The Post’s Watergate Source,” Washington Post, June 1, 2005, link; Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

¹⁰¹ John Acacia, Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Peter Dale Scott, "The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment," in Mark Selden (ed.), Remaking Asia: Essays on the American Uses of Power (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 107-26; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 185, reporting on New York Times editorial of January 6, 1968.

¹⁰² Michael Temple, The British press (Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2008), 123-24, 133; Tom Crone, Law and the media: an everyday guide for professionals (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991), 15.4.

¹⁰³ Don Van Natta, Jr., “Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says,” New York Times, March 27, 2006.

¹⁰⁴ “Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane,’” Independent (London), February 3, 2006; “Bush and Blair 'plotted to provoke Saddam into war,’”

Daily Mail (London), February 3, 2006; “Bush wanted spy plane in UN colours to trick Saddam, claims book,” Herald (Glasgow), February 3, 2006.

¹⁰⁵  E.g. “Iraq fallout: Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq,” Guardian (London), June 21, 2009. In the interests of accuracy, I should note that the Times repeated the Van Natta story in its wholly owned subsidiary, The International Herald Tribune, March 28, 2006.

¹⁰⁶ Scott, American War Machine, 77, 84; cf. Donald J. Mabry (ed.), The Latin American narcotics trade and U.S. national security (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.), 24; McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 124.

¹⁰⁷ William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 206.

¹⁰⁸ Scott, Deep Politics, 167; citing San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1959, 4; New York Times, January 15, 1959, 4.

¹⁰⁹ Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 172-85. The press in this period did not just transmit government lies; it occasionally transmitted gross lies of its own. See Cocaine Politics, 179-81, a manufactured lie in the Washington Post of July 22. 1987, whose falsity I could confirm‎ as an eyewitness.

¹¹⁰ Cockburn, Whiteout, 29.

¹¹¹ Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). .

¹¹² Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 65-66; Kevin Cunningham, J. Edgar Hoover: Controversial FBI Director (Minneapolis, Minn.: Compass Point Books, 2006), 66.

¹¹³ Caro, 290. Cf. B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 364: “One of Rometsch's more durable recent relationships, Anderson emphasized [in a July 1963 column], had been with a Soviet embassy attaché. Delaware's puritanical Republican Senator John J. (‘Whispering John’) Williams noticed the item. So did J. Edgar Hoover.”

¹¹⁴ B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 364.

¹¹⁵ “Bowtie” file, link, 35, cf. 4.

¹¹⁶ Summers, Official and Confidential. 306-07.

¹¹⁷ Summers, Official and Confidential. 311.

¹¹⁸ Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 906.

¹¹⁹ B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 367.

¹²⁰ Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 616-17; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 232.

¹²¹ B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 368-69.

¹²² Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 230-40. Cf. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984.

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3932

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 3, April 29, 2013.

America’s Unchecked Security State: Part II: The Continuity of COG Detention Planning, 1948-2001

Peter Dale Scott

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Hoover and the Origins of COG’s Emergency Planning

In November 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, Hoover also began to compile a list of individuals to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. In June 1940 he sought and gained the approval of Attorney General Robert Jackson for this list, known as the Custodial Detention list. (Late in life, Jackson appears to have regretted the powers that Hoover accumulated.)¹²³

The Custodial Detention list played no role in the wholesale displacement in 1942 of Japanese and coastal Italians, which Hoover opposed.¹²⁴ In 1943 Biddle decided that the Custodial Detention list had outlived its usefulness and that there was no statutory authorization for it. His order to Hoover to close the list was unambiguous:

The [Justice] Department fulfills its proper function by investigating the activities of persons who may have violated the law. It is not aided in this work by classifying persons as to dangerousness….

[But] upon receipt of this order, the FBI Director did not abolish the FBI’s list. Instead, he changed its name from Custodial Detention List to Security Index.¹²⁵

Hoover’s decision to disregard Biddle’s order, leaving his detention program planning without legal authorization “remained secret until after his death.”¹²⁶  The plans, along with Hoover’s illegal intelligence acquisitions and his use of organized crime as a source for them, were cornerstones in his conversion of the FBI into a powerful bureau that was both publicly funded and in part outside the domain of public law. This in turn became the key element in his aggregation of powers into what in the past I have called the deep state.

In particular the detention list survived a second and third effort to abolish it.

When the Security Index was ordered closed in 1971, the names were again transferred, to a new Administrative Index (ADEX). This new ADEX was in turn discontinued in 1978 under Jimmy Carter and his Attorney General Griffin Bell.¹²⁷ But the list was not destroyed, and remained available for use by the new Reagan Administration, when in 1982 a secret committee including Rumsfeld and Cheney began planning for mass detentions under the rubric of Continuity of Government (COG) planning.

How Hoover’s Detention Plans Became Part of National Emergency (COG) Planning

According to Tim Weiner, it was on July 7, 1950, at the crest of the hysteria fomented by the Korean War and by hearings in HUAC and SISS, Hoover for the first time formally briefed the White House and the NSC his plans for “the mass detention of political suspects in military stockades, a secret prison system for jailing American citizens, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.”¹²⁸ He also revealed that he had had since 1939 a list of about twelve thousand individuals, nearly all of them U.S. citizens, who under his plan could be rounded up summarily on the issuance of a single “master warrant.”¹²⁹  (According to Tim Weiner, Hoover had also approved a plan, never fully implemented, “to put every one of the roughly eighty thousand members of the Communist Party of the United States on the FBI’s secret Security [i.e. detention] Index.”)¹³⁰

Hoover’s plan was soon paralleled in Congress by the passage (over Truman’s veto) of the McCarran Internal Security Act in the same year, whose Title II authorized the Attorney General in times of emergency to round up and hold individuals in detention centers. Congress, in passing the Emergency Detention Act, was unaware that Hoover had already assumed this power. Moreover the Act established certain protections of individual human rights, which Hoover and some DOJ officials considered “unworkable.”

Accordingly, Attorney General J. Howard directed the FBI to ignore the congressionally mandated standards and instead base current and future detention investigation on the administration’s secretly authorized program.¹³¹

In this decision we see a sign of America’s emerging dual state, in which some U.S. agencies are directed secretly to ignore the law.

In October 1950 the entry of China into the Korean War moved Truman on December 16, 1950, to proclaim “a national emergency, which requires that the military, naval, air, and civilian defenses of this country be strengthened as speedily as possible.”¹³² Truman’s proclamation of a national emergency authorized publicly the military buildup authorized secretly two days earlier in NSC 68/4 of December 14; in the same way that Bush’s proclamation of a national emergency on September 14, 2011 became the public authority for the COG measures implemented secretly by Cheney and Rumsfeld (during Bush’s absence from Washington) on 9/11.¹³³

The Chinese intervention also persuaded Truman to threaten Beijing with possible use of atomic weapons.[i] As the Soviet Union now possessed its own bomb, Truman initiated COG planning to deal with a possible counterattack. Thus in a sense it can be said that the manic planning for Doomsday is a by-product of the Korean War.

Truman’s proclamation of a national emergency lasted until 1977. Under Eisenhower “A series of atomic attack simulations, entitled “Operation Alert,” were implemented from 1955 to 1960, … to test “the capability of all levels of government to operate following an attack.”¹³⁴ These exercises generated a growing number of Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs, which have been since defined by FEMA as

“[f]inal drafts of Presidential messages, proposed legislation proclamations, and other formal documents, including DOJ [Department of Justice]-issued cover sheets addressed to the President, to be issued in event of a Presidentially-declared national emergency.”¹³⁵

We learn from an internal FBI memo of June 19, 1958 that some of these PEADs from the FBI concerned the “apprehension and detention of those dangerous alien enemies presently included in our Security Index.”¹³⁶ (One wonders what “dangerous alien enemies” were contemplated in the emergency planning of the late 1950s, when the Communist Party was by then clearly moribund, and the USG had not yet begun to stoke xenophobic anxieties about terrorists.)

Of even greater significance to COG planning in the 1980s and 1990s was the decision by Eisenhower’s cabinet to commission new “executive agencies to develop continuity measures - the means by which a fragmented federal government could begin to exercise authority over a devastated nation.”¹³⁷ One of these, destined to mushroom under Reagan into a billion-dollar boondoggle, was the National Communications Agency (NCA), whose designated task was to “assist in maintaining the flow of essential national telecommunications.” Like some of the other such agencies, it was chaired by a corporate executive outside government: in this case by President Frank Stanton of the CBS Television Network.¹³⁸ Eisenhower had first brought in Stanton and other prominent private citizens for Doomsday planning, just “a few weeks after the Soviets launched the first manmade satellite in 1957, shattering America's sense of security.” The involvement of private leaders has been a feature of Doomsday planning ever since.¹³⁹

The NCA was a precursor of the National Communications System (NCS), formally established by a JFK Presidential Memorandum on August 21, 1963. By 1969 at least $175 million had been spent “to increase the survivability of national communications resources” in a nuclear attack.¹⁴⁰ In June 1979 the system was tested under Carter, in the first known instance of the COG exercise GLOBAL SHIELD. By the Reagan era the NCS had mushroomed into an $8 billion communications and logistics program for an alternative emergency communications network.¹⁴¹

Elsewhere I have argued that in the background of 9/11, as well as in all comparable deep events diverting America towards its current dual state, we can see the workings of “the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.”¹⁴² The most obvious example is in Iran-Contra, when Oliver North, arranging for the arms shipments to Iran that eventually cost him his job, used the nation’s top secret Doomsday communications network. North’s network, known as Flashboard,

excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad.¹⁴³

North was also actively developing the plans, which as we have seen originated with Hoover, for emergency detentions on a large scale.¹⁴⁴

So, before him, was James McCord, famous for having participated in the 1972 burglary that precipitated the 1972 Watergate crisis.

McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.” His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’”¹⁴⁵

From this time forward into the 1990s, the FBI’s emergency plans and PEADs would be melded into the national emergency planning process, which in turn was enmeshed in Iran-Contra and also possibly Watergate.¹⁴⁶

Hoover’s Use of Organized Crime as a Source of Intelligence

From the outset, Hoover’s power over most other agencies of government (but conspicuously not the CIA) was reinforced by his de facto alliance with the overworld and its political armies, combined with his de facto alliance with underworld criminal elements. Back in 1919-20, Hoover’s Bureau, in conducting its nation-wide raids and arrests, “coordinated its work closely with a 250,000 member right-wing vigilante group, the American Protective League,” supported by business leaders.¹⁴⁷ In later years Hoover continued to augment the FBI’s spying networks and files with other business-supported organizations, above all the American Legion¹⁴⁸ and its post-war offshoot the American Security Council (ASC).

The second major network supplementing the FBI was the Anti-Defamation League, According to its prominent critic Alfred M. Lilienthal, “the ADL … works closely with the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and sometimes with the FBI or CIA.”¹⁴⁹

The author and Village Voice journalist Robert Friedman agrees:

At the onset of the Cold War, the ADL was running perhaps the largest private spy agency in America, regularly feeding the FBI information not only on anti-Semitic groups like the KKK and the American Nazi party, but also on Jewish leftists and members of the Communist Party….  It supplied not only the FBI, but, according to the Congressional Record, the Commerce Department, which reviewed the files of applicants for government jobs, searching for "subversives."…. In the '50's and '60s, the ADL continued to penetrate and expose racist and fascist groups. It also championed the civil rights movement, speaking out for fair housing and against job discrimination. Yet as always, there was a darker side. The ADL spied on Martin Luther King and passed its files to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, according to Henry Schwarzchild, who was an ADL officer from 1962 to 1964 and is now an official with the ACLU. "It was common and casually accepted knowledge," Schwarzchild told the S.F. Weekly.¹⁵⁰

Hoover also exploited the close and arguably very improper relationships that he maintained with wealthy, usually independent and self-made, millionaires like Joseph Kennedy, Clint Murchison, Sr., Lewis Rosenstiel, and George Allen (Hoover’s backdoor forwarder to Truman of the memo attacking McCloy).¹⁵¹

It is a telling sign of the deep state milieu after Prohibition that every one of these self-made millionaires had intimate connections to organized crime – and there are many reports that through them and their journalistic friends like Walter Winchell, Hoover himself met at New York’s Stork Club with organized crime figures like Frank Costello.¹⁵² Burton Hersh asserts that Hoover tactfully maintained this connection to the Stork Club milieu because “Costello was a resource.”¹⁵³

The Stork Club, where Hoover liked to hobnob with journalists like Walter Winchell and mobsters like Frank Cosgello 

For decades Hoover declined to investigate and prosecute organized crime, claiming “that it was a local police problem, outside of the FBI’s jurisdiction.”¹⁵⁴ As former FBI agent Peter Pitchess (later Sheriff of Los Angeles County) recalled, “Organized crime was just not a concern of the Bureau. We knew it existed, but there were hardly any prosecutions, and we knew this was FBI policy.”¹⁵⁵ In this way Hoover tacitly accepted Tammany-style corruption as a reinforcement of the status quo, and also as a resource for dealing with outsiders who threatened it.

Hoover was recognizing and sanctioning, rather than creating, the social status of the Mob, which at the time helped elect politicians and perform favors for the wealthy. In particular Hoover was helping to preserve a status quo in which organized crime continued to help wealthy industrialists like Henry Ford (or more precisely his security chief Harry Bennett) fight trade unions like the United Auto Workers, by granting delivery contracts and concessions to prominent mobsters like Joe Adonis, Brooklyn’s top man in narcotics.¹⁵⁶

An important political consequence of this de facto tolerance was to protect and reinforce the enduring influence of organized crime in the local politics of cities like New York, Newark, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. This was brought home to me through my researches into Jack Ruby, whom I linked in an early manuscript to a nation-wide network of mob figures involved in gambling and narcotics. One morning I was surprised to see in our local newspaper that one of Ruby’s associates, Benny Barrish, was named for his part in the 1974 lease of a San Francisco City golf course to an east coast gangster.¹⁵⁷

Hoover did not just tolerate organized crime: he used it not just as a source of information, but as a source also of enforcement. A notorious example of the latter was the surrender of Louis Lepke Buchalter to Hoover personally, negotiated with the approval of Lansky and the aid of newsman Walter Winchell at the Stork Club.¹⁵⁸ Enforcement was politically selective. For example when in 1957 a rogue ex-FBI agent, with the assistance of Joe Zicarelli of the Bonanno family, kidnapped the left-wing Dominican journalist Jesús de Galindez on behalf of Dominican dictator Trujillo (who subsequently had him murdered), Hoover, rather than indict a right-wing dictator, “informed the Justice and State Departments that the case against Trujillo and his henchmen was not ‘sufficiently airtight.’”¹⁵⁹

Hoover used political criteria to recruit and protect individual mafia members as informants, a process which could easily lead to corruption and scandal – some of which still exists. The example of Ali Mohamed, examined earlier, was far from unique. In 1971, as a favor to his political ally, House Speaker John McCormack, Hoover in a personal memo directed the Boston FBI office to develop Whitey Bulger, then a minor mob figure, as an informant. (Whitey’s brother James was part of the McCormack political machine and a member of the House of Representatives.)¹⁶⁰

For two decades Bulger fed inside information about the Boston Patriarca crime family to his FBI contact John Connolly (also appointed by Hoover on the recommendation of McCormack). At the same time Whitey Bulger ran a lucrative protection racket targeting drug kingpins and gambling operators. Eventually Bulger was indicted for 19 murders, including the murder of another FBI informant for which crime Connolly was also jailed.¹⁶¹

The Connolly-Bulger scandal in Boston was not anomalous. In the 1980s a  very similar scandal developed in the FBI’s New York office, where agent Lin DeVecchio protected his mafia informant Gregory Scarpa, Sr., from arrest, allowing Scarpa to commit a series of mob murders with impunity.¹⁶² Author Peter Lance has made a persuasive case that the FBI’s eagerness to cover up the DeVecchio scandal eventually led it to cover up significant evidence about 9/11.¹⁶³

Hoover’s Use of Illegal Methods to Combat the Ku Klux Klan

Those who like myself celebrate the nonviolent desegregation of the South in the 1960s need to recognize that the civil rights movement did not achieve this fundamental change without other efforts to enforce federal laws. The White House deployed federal manpower to enforce rulings of the federal courts -- U.S. marshals whenever possible. These were inadequate, however, when Governor Ross Barnett in 1962 sought to block the court-ordered admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi, an event which “many historians view as ground zero on the southern counterrevolution against integration and multiculturalism.”¹⁶⁴ In this case a well-organized riot forced the Kennedy brothers to send in more than twelve thousand U.S. Army soldiers, climaxing a fixed battle that left two people dead.¹⁶⁵

The attempt of the Kennedys to use the law against insurrection began to look increasingly counterproductive. Robert Kennedy then moved against General Edwin Walker, who had mobilized the mob at Ole Miss “with his contingent of gunmen from Dallas” by remanding the general for psychiatric examination at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. “The John Birch Society and other far-right groups heralded this as an example of the ‘Kennedy police state.’”¹⁶⁶ After five days, the USG backed down and Walker was released, now a “leading light” of the Birch Society in Dallas and elsewhere.¹⁶⁷ And he still had good connections with other right-wingers in the US military.

In April 1963 there was a meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom, Inc., a Miami detective's report of which included the statement that "there was indicated the overthrow of the present government of the United States," including "the setting up of a criminal activity to assassinate particular persons." The report added that "membership within the Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high ranking members of the armed forces that secretly belong to the organization."^[168] Things were beginning to get out of hand.

Characteristically, Hoover took no known steps against this conclave of “high ranking members of the armed forces;” indeed, he took steps to discredit the source.¹⁶⁹ With respect to the lower middle-class Klan, however, his response was quite different.¹⁷⁰ While the White House used legal means to respond to the phenomenon of Klan violence, Hoover secretly resorted to illegal means to go after the hidden roots of disorder in the Klan and its allies. This may have been more important as well as less disruptive, for as journalist Maryanne Vollers has noted, “the retaliation that followed Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss showed a pattern indicting that someone was directing a terror campaign in the state.”¹⁷¹ (It is possible, though not certain, that Hoover had better intelligence than Kennedy on the strength of the deep powers backing Klan resistance to desegregation.)

Ku Klux Klan violence in the 1960s was checked by the FBI -- also using violence 

Admittedly Hoover dealt very belatedly with the problem of racial violence, but in the end he also did so forcefully. He himself was a segregationist by background and inclination. In 1956 he warned Eisenhower’s cabinet about the dangers of “mixed education” from desegregation, including the “specter of racial [i.e. interracial] marriage.”¹⁷² As late as 1961 there were only five African-American FBI agents, all of whom “mostly served as drivers.”¹⁷³

There were other factors inhibiting his commitment to racial justice. The FBI model for social stability was cooperation with local law enforcement, which in the Deep South was committed to segregation. And much of Hoover’s support in Congress came from southern racist committee chairmen like Senator Eastland, the overseer of the SISS.

And yet, as the civil rights movement was answered with more and more bombings and murders from a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, Hoover himself intervened, far more vigorously than is generally recognized. It is widely known that on September 2, 1964, after the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, Hoover matched his COINTELPRO against “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” (including the SCLC and Martin Luther King) with a new COINTELPRO – WHITE HATE directed exclusively against the Klan.¹⁷⁴ In the next seven years the FBI conducted 287 separate operations, and by September 1965, the FBI could identify 2,000 Klansmen on its payroll as informants.¹⁷⁵

It is wrong to dismiss Hoover’s anti-Klan campaign as “small” compared to other COINTELPROs.¹⁷⁶ On the contrary, “COINTELPRO activities had a devastating effect on Klan activity. There were so many undercover agents operating in the Klan that Klan leaders became hesitant to make decisions for fear that the FBI would learn of them.”^[177]

Tim Weiner writes that

“Mr. Hoover never would have changed by himself” not without LBJ’s forceful command [on July 2, 1964], Burke Marshall [RFK’s civil rights chief] said. “The FBI was grudging about doing anything” against the Klan. “Mr. Hoover viewed the civil-rights activists as lawbreakers. The FBI was worse than useless, given his mind-set” – until the president ordered him to change his mind.¹⁷⁸

Marshall’s negative judgment of Hoover reflects that voiced at the time by Martin Luther King. However Athan Theoharis reports that, already in 1963, Hoover had subordinated his distaste for the nonviolent civil rights movement to his concern that certain Klan elements represented an organized violent insurrection, against the court-ordered imposition of federal laws. Not only this, Hoover had decided to fight illegal violence with illegal violence – the resources of the deep state.

It is not yet widely known that, after the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in June 1963, Hoover allegedly authorized the use of a mafia killer, “Julio” [possibly Gregory Scarpa], to extract the name of Evers’ murderer from a pistol-whipped and terrorized witness.¹⁷⁹ A year later, after the June 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, Scarpa again extracted the facts for the FBI from a witness, this time by brandishing a straight-edge razor and unzipping the witness’ fly.¹⁸⁰ And in 1966, after the arson-murder of Vernon Dahmer, Scarpa identified the culprit from a witness beaten so violently he was hospitalized and never again the same.¹⁸¹

Among those arrested and eventually convicted as a result of Scarpa’s interventions was Samuel Holloway Bowers, leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, “the most successfully violent KKK subgroup in the nation.”¹⁸² Bowers was the power behind murders and bombings across the entire Deep South (including, a recent book has suggested, at least one murder plot against Martin Luther King).¹⁸³ He had rightly anticipated that he would not be tried in a Mississippi state court; but Scarpa’s discoveries helped enable the federal government to convict him and establish federal authority. This ended the impunity of Bowers’ Klan, and defused its dangerous “strategy to induce [a] race war.”¹⁸⁴

Samuel Bowers, the Ku Klux Klan leader and murderer successfully targeted by the FBI

In 1967, after the conviction of Bowers, remnants of his White Knights began bombing Jewish synagogues and homes.¹⁸⁵ This escalation of violence, to include white as well as black targets, also escalated the FBI’s resort to illegalities, far beyond the use of torture to obtain evidence. According to investigative reporter Jack Nelson, who broke the story, the FBI in 1968 helped provoke the attempted bombing of a Jewish businessman’s home in Meridian, Mississippi. In Nelson’s account, the FBI hired two informants to induce two of Bowers’ close associates (Thomas A. Tarrants III and another Klansman) to attempt another bombing, so that police waiting at the scene could execute them during the commission of the crime.¹⁸⁶

As Nelson pointed out, this represented a new level of FBI illegality:

1)   it involved premeditated murder;

2)   it involved entrapment – Tarrants (and another victim, not the intended target) “had been lured into a trap by a pair of informants;”

3)   the informants [one of them out on appeal after being convicted for shooting the three civil rights workers in 1964] were motivated, not just by thousands of dollars in reward money put up by the local Anti-Defamation League, but also by “threats by the local police and the FBI to kill them if they didn’t cooperate.”¹⁸⁷

It is difficult to defend such tactics, other than to note (as Nelson does) that 1968 was “a year like no other,” with killings and unprecedented rioting around the nation and the world.¹⁸⁸ Nelson himself was so shocked by what he learned that he broke with the local FBI (his source for earlier stories) and alerted the nation to the illegalities.¹⁸⁹

At the same time Nelson had to concede that, “Since the ambush, there had been no further violence against Jews in Mississippi.”¹⁹⁰ His assessment is expanded on by professor George Michael: “The attack proved effective, as it finally broke the back of the Klan violence in Mississippi.”^[191]

Let me close this dubious late chapter in Hoover’s career with words spoken by Gandhi shortly before his assassination: “No good act can produce an evil result. Evil means, even for a good end, produce evil results.”¹⁹² Evil results, in this case, even for the FBI itself.

*

The End of Hooverism and the Debates of the Post-Vietnam Era

It can be said that by 1968 Hoover, William Sullivan, the other leaders in Washington, and the country itself were all driven awry from violence, all no longer themselves, all out of control.¹⁹³ I wrote earlier that “all power intoxicates; unchecked power intoxicates irrevocably.” Like Defense Secretary Forrestal and CIA officer Frank Wisner, both Hoover and Sullivan were by now behaving so oddly that their behavior, especially Sullivan’s, was being questioned by their own colleagues.¹⁹⁴

But the mania by 1968 was institutional, not just personal. The FBI by then, at Sullivan’s urging, had helped instigate a number of other murders, notably that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, killed with multiple gun wounds while at home sleeping in his bed.¹⁹⁵ Furthermore there were a number of instances where the FBI instigated battles, sometimes lethal, between the Panthers and other groups, making the Bureau, as legal scholar Frank Donner has written, “criminally complicit in the violence" that ensued.¹⁹⁶ Across the country

break-ins and assaults were carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups coordinating their efforts with FBI informants, military intelligence agents, and local police investigative units…. The FBI relationship to the far right reached a violent climax in San Diego, where an FBI informant testified the FBI provided him with $10,000 worth of weapons, including explosives used in a bombing by the Secret Army Organization (SAO), a right-wing group which harassed activists protesting the Vietnam war. The FBI even hid a gun used in an SAO assassination attempt against a leftist professor until an ACLU-sponsored lawsuit by a woman wounded in the assault forced the FBI to reveal the weapon's existence.¹⁹⁷

The FBI’s escalation in the use of violence reflected the increasingly independent domination of the its COINTELPROs by Assistant Director William “Crazy Bill” Sullivan.¹⁹⁸ Already in 1967 Sullivan had challenged Hoover’s aging leadership, arguing that the Ku Klux Klan was a far greater threat than the CPUSA. As Hoover grew increasingly cautious, Sullivan took less and less guidance from his director, and built violence-prone coalitions instead with James Angleton in the CIA, and eventually the Nixon White House.¹⁹⁹

In a dialectic worthy of a Greek tragedy, the FBI’s excesses had seriously undermined Hoover’s powers before his death in 1972. Nelson, backed by his newspaper the L.A. Times, proceeded, after exposing the Meridian incident, to expose a series of other FBI illegalities, inducing Hoover in turn to put Nelson on his enemies’ list and wage a lying war against him as a “jackal” and “a lice-covered ferret.”²⁰⁰ Nelson’s sequence of page-one stories had the consequence of eroding Hoover’s support in both Congress and the White House: “Suddenly, after years of near idolization, J. Edgar Hoover was no longer untouchable. The FBI director was now fair game.”²⁰¹

Before Hoover’s death in 1972 Congress had finally begun to expose and condemn Hoover’s wiretapping and other illegalities. As Hoover became more and more reluctant to break the law, he became increasingly a curb to the illegalities of others – notably the increasingly obvious efforts of William Sullivan to replace him, with the support of President Nixon. A denouement of sorts was Hoover’s blocking of the 1970 “Huston Plan” for a consolidated national police uniting the resources of FBI, CIA, DIA, and NSA. The plan was nominally proposed Tom Huston in the Nixon White House, but in fact drafted chiefly by Sullivan. The other agencies supported the proposal and Nixon initially signed it; but Hoover, by enlisting Attorney General Mitchell as an ally, succeeded in persuading Nixon to reverse his decision.²⁰²

This episode was not without consequences. In the short run, the defeat of the Huston Plan drove the White House to engage unilaterally in the series of illegalities we remember as “Watergate.”²⁰³ And the coalition of agencies backing the plan was revived during the COG planning (the Doomsday Project) of the 1980s and 1990s. Viewed retrospectively, the Huston Plan looks like an early blueprint for the shadow security state we live under today.

But simultaneously Hoover, increasingly out of touch with reality, began to lose the self-restraint with which he had previously managed his own secret intelligence. In 1971 a congressman who was also a U.S. Navy hero, Commander William Anderson, spoke in the House and

rebuked J. Edgar Hoover … for accusing two prominent opponents of the Vietnam War of plotting to kidnap a government official and blow up electrical systems in the Washington area. He termed Hoover’s accusations the “climax” of “an outrageous pattern of fear and repression.”²⁰⁴

Such a rebuke of Hoover in Congress was unprecedented, and so was Hoover’s response. Instead of privately threatening Anderson, he

had the Congressman investigated…. Agents found a madam who “thought" Anderson had visited her place of business several years earlier. Hoover then scribbled “whoremonger” on the memorandum…and arranged to have the story leaked to the press in Anderson’s home state…. In 1972, William Anderson --…four-term congressman from Tennessee – was defeated for reelection.²⁰⁵

But the spell of the FBI over Congress had been broken; and in a few years Congress, in a turnabout, would begin to investigate the FBI.

The Debate Over Secret Powers in the Post-Vietnam Interim Before Reagan

After the traumas of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, the national mood for more transparency in government increased, at least temporarily. A number of Congressional committees, notably the Senate Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, began to examine some of the illegalities of the COINTELPROs, as did an administrative committee of Justice department officials set up by Attorney General William Saxbe.²⁰⁶

It appeared briefly, in short, that the public state might bring Hooverism under control. And indeed, a number of key FBI programs, such as the Security List for emergency mass detentions, were terminated, at least on paper, in 1978. Congress also passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Act of 1978, as a compromise effort to regulate wiretapping. In addition two senior FBI officials were convicted in 1980 for having authorized illegal break-ins.²⁰⁷

But meanwhile other counterforces were building to reverse what Professor Samuel Huntington, in a study for the Trilateral Commission, called the "excess of democracy" then current in the American system.²⁰⁸ In 1974 the new Ford White House, with first Donald Rumsfeld and later Dick Cheney as Chief of Staff, became a focal point for resisting the efforts of Church and others to achieve greater openness in American government.²⁰⁹

In 1974 the new Ford White House, with first Donald Rumsfeld and later Dick Cheney as Chief of Staff, became a focal point for resisting the efforts of Church and others to achieve greater openness in American government.[ii]

Rumsfeld and Cheney were not acting alone. Behind them were the forces determined to see that U.S. defense budget did not shrink (as candidate Jimmy Carter intended) after Vuetnam. And behind the neocons of the 1970s Committee on the Present Danger were still other, more shadowy international forces, such as the Saudi-backed Safari Club of intelligence chiefs, and behind it the ultra-reactionary political backers of future leaders Reagan and Thatcher in the Pinay Circle.[iii]

Although the predominant issues after the collapse of the Saigon regime in Vietnam were the future of détente and the defense budget, also at stake was the future of the secret powers amassed by Hoover – above all warrantless surveillance. Journalists Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein write that in this period Cheney, aided by his friend Antonin Scalia (then Chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel) “teamed up to defend executive privilege,” including “illegal wiretapping.”²¹⁰ Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Scalia also united in an unsuccessful campaign to block implementation of the important 1976 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).²¹¹

This campaign of Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney in the Ford White House, to protect the FBI and CIA from congressional tampering, was part of a larger campaign, to put an end to Nixon-Kissinger policies of detente and multipolarity, and put America back on the path towards global domination.

In the so-called Halloween Massacre of 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney also arranged to end Kissinger’s tenure as national security advisor, and for Nelson Rockefeller to be removed from his expected vice-presidential position on the 1976 Republican ticket. This opened the way to the election of Reagan in 1980 and the subsequent Reagan Revolution, the final victory of the executive forces for secrecy over the Congressional efforts at openness.²¹² With the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to a secret COG planning committee in 1982 (the so-called Doomsday Project), arrangements resumed for warrantless surveillance, massive emergency detentions and other suspended features of Hoover’s agenda.

In short the Post-Vietnam struggle in Washington, between the Congressional defenders of a public state, and the Administrative defenders of secret powers, was effectively resolved by the launching in 1982 of the so-called Doomsday Project: plans for an emergency suspension of provisions in the Constitution. Today the landmark achievements of the post-Watergate reforms, such as the FISA Act and the National Emergencies Act, are dead. Programs briefly suspended, such as the maintenance of lists for wide-scale detention, have been restored on a level far wider than before.

Of all the post-Watergate reforms, the most visible one to survive was the establishment, by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, of permanent committees in both the Senate and the House for oversight of the CIA and FBI. Those who see this reform as significant point to the Iran-Contra crisis of the 1980s, when a congressional ban on CIA aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (the so-called Boland Amendments) led to illegal responses by White House officials, and their subsequent exposure. But the intention of the reform can be said to have been effectively reversed, making the committees into constituencies for the intelligence agencies, rather than custodians of them.²¹³ Thus in the 1980s the Committees not only gave the CIA full leash on their dubious Afghan operation, Congressman Charlie Wilson actually pressed on the CIA a larger budget than many CIA operatives wanted.²¹⁴

To sum up: on the surface, one can date the recent growth on unchecked secret powers in America to 9/11 and the implementation that morning of Continuity of Government (COG) measures that had been secretly planned for two decades by Cheney and Rumsfeld, even when the two men were not officially part of the U.S. Government. But that event had been prepared for, perhaps even made inevitable, by the much earlier Rumsfeld-Cheney victory in the post-Vietnam contest between Congress and the White House: over whether the public state would control the deep state, or vice versa.

Hooverism and the Doomsday Mania: the Instructive Difference

The Doomsday Mania, I would once have said, had restored Hooverism. I would now say that COG planning, in restoring specific Hoover techniques, has gone beyond Hooverism to something far more dangerous. In addition, some of the illegalities that Hoover merely planned for (like massive detention), Rumsfeld and Cheney, after also planning for two decades, implemented on September 11, 2001.

The COG measures implemented on 9/11, have supplemented Hoover’s powers with parallel powers developed by the CIA and NSA (as foreseen in the Huston Plan), plus the worst FBI illegalities from the emergency era of the 1960s. Torture, practiced by the FBI in an extreme situation, became embodied in legal memoranda as a standard way to interrogate suspects. Preemptive murder of opponents, as practiced by the FBI in Meridian and Chicago, is now the standard practice of the drone program initiated by Bush and Cheney and since expanded by Obama. In brief, as I said earlier, the aims of Hooverism were to maintain the status quo, while the aim of the Doomsday Mania has been explicitly to change it.

Hoover’s actions against the Klan were accompanied by similar illegal actions against Martin Luther King, whom he once characterized, on the record, as “the most notorious liar in the country.”²¹⁵ The two campaigns, set side by side, reveal Hoover’s commitment to the status quo, against any forces, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent, threatening change.²¹⁶

His tactics to crush the Klan were clearly illegal. But they were in response to murders and a challenge to public order. They were also in their way measured, and in their way less disruptive of the peace than the “legal” tactics of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s -- whose response to the challenge at Ole Miss had resulted not only in lethal violence but the responsive determination of Bowers and others to commit serial murders, in order to induce an apocalyptic race war.²¹⁷

In this respect Hoover’s “deep state” illegalities can be distinguished from those we have witnessed since 9/11 against al Qaeda. Hoover’s actions were finite and narrowly targeted, in order to achieve a successful consolidation of federal law. His methods were essentially nonviolent against the nonviolent, violent against the violent.²¹⁸ The implementation of COG planning we have seen since 9/11 has been, in contrast, an open-ended erosion of law and liberty, increasing year by year, with no end in sight.

In this essay I have tried to show Hoover’s responsibility for developing the traditions of suspending habeas corpus and other constitutional liberties that have been implemented in the last decade. But we should also recognize the huge difference between planning for a suspension of liberty, and the implementation of those plans. There is no evidence that Hoover wanted to see his emergency plans implemented by state institutions including his own FBI. But Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, after working on COG plans for almost two decades, called publicly in 2000 for “a process of transformation, which even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event— like a new Pearl Harbor.”²¹⁹

The Expansion of Secret Powers Since 9/11

With the implementation of COG emergency responses to 9/11, we have indeed seen an exponential expansion of America as a dual state, or what Dana Priest has called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.²²⁰

The second government, called by Priest “Top Secret America,” should not be thought of as identical to the deep state, but rather as the radically expanded institutional base for the deep state, ensuring an ever greater share of the national budget for top-down programs to constrain dissent both abroad and at home.

The unchecked expansion of this base – much of it now outsourced – has continued under Obama, even as budgetary cutbacks have continued to weaken the public government citizens are familiar with. For example

CACI…recorded $36.4 million in profits in the third quarter of fiscal 2011. It hired four hundred new employees and was looking for another four hundred. Analysts attributed its success to the swelling cybersecurity and intelligence markets and to its lucrative contracts with the army for intelligence and information war services.²²¹

A percentage of such profits are inevitably dedicated to making budget allocations for security as certain in Congress as Hoover’s FBI budget was when he was at his prime. These flows of funds further trivialize the independence of Congress, to the point where, as Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel recently wrote, “"Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace."²²²

Priest notes how Obama campaigned in 2008 as a critic of a number of covert programs, including torture, renditions, and secret prisons – yet in the end, torture aside, the new administration, in the words of a CIA observer, “changed virtually nothing.”²²³ Indeed, after having promised great openness, the Obama administration has proceeded to indict more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, with a vindictiveness that has brought a reprimand from a federal judge.²²⁴

Dana Priest’s book is of great value for its researches into a Top Secret realm not normally described in the governing media. But it is almost silent about the human agents who have brought us here: in her book Dick Cheney is mentioned only once in passing, and there is nothing at all about the COG planning of the Doomsday Project.

At one point a statement by Janet Napolitano, Obama’s cabinet-level Secretary of Homeland Security, reminds Priest of J. Edgar Hoover and “the dark days of McCarthyism, when…an obsessed and paranoid FBI had drawn up a black list” (the Security Index).²²⁵ There is indeed a sense in which America’s Doomsday Mania today is derived from Hoover’s obsessive penchant for surveillance and control. But if we were to begin by returning to the dual state as it operated under Hoover, this would represent a return to a far more limited form of secret government than that oppressing us today.

Conclusion

Recent American history has seen two competing narratives: one relatively stable and benign, and one posing a dangerous threat to constitutional democracy. On the one hand a succession of power-hungry men have first amassed excessive powers and then in consequence have self-destructed or been ousted: Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Richard Nixon in 1974, Oliver North in 1986, and Donald Rumsfeld in 2006.²²⁶ Their rise and fall might suggest that American politics essentially comprises a self-correcting, homeostatic system, one in which excessive power generates counterforces to correct it. But this appearance of equilibrium is misleading.

Each of these visible figures exercised power because of their connection to the subterranean accumulation of illegal secret powers assembled originally and principally by J. Edgar Hoover. The departure of individuals did not establish effective legal checks and balances on the deep powers behind them. The one serious congressional effort to do this, after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, was successfully stymied by two men (Rumsfeld and Cheney) who went on to plan successfully for the expansion of these same powers in the Doomsday Project.

The second narrative illustrates the truth of the principle, well understood by America’s Founding Fathers, that power, unchecked, will continue to grow like a cancer. This unchecked growth of the security state has been reinforced by a parallel and related development – the unchecked accumulation of gross wealth by the top one percent of the one percent.²²⁷

The combined growth of great wealth and the security state has radically diminished the powers of the public state (and above all Congress) to restore equilibrium to the American political system. This process, as many have warned, is not at all homeostatic, but threatens disaster if not brought under control.

Corresponding to these two narratives are two opposing prospects for America’s future: one optimistic and one gloomy. The development of the Internet has provided new channels of communication for those concerned progressives and dissidents (including “conspiracy theorists) who are unheard in the increasingly corporatized and corrupt governing media. These in turn have supplied a growing constituency in support of those isolated and embattled whistleblowers who have arisen in virtually every agency contributing to the unchecked security state. And we have seen at least two successful bureaucratic revolts in the last decade: first in the FBI and the Justice Department against the torture memos inspired by Cheney, and then “the revolt of the generals” against Donald Rumsfeld.

A pessimist would respond that these developments have somewhat rationalized and heightened the powers of the security state. A rational assessment of the data assembled in this essay gives no grounds for predicting that the checks needed for democratic checks and balances will soon emerge. If they do not, a veneer of continuity will mask the growing irrelevance of the public state’s democratic institutions, leaving them to debate fruitlessly – in the same way that the Roman Senate continued to debate as the Republic slouched into Empire.

In terms of logical analysis, the likely prospect would seem to be the pessimistic one. But neither humans nor their history are wholly logical. The last century has seen a number of nonviolent changes – even revolutions – that few social scientists were able logically to predict. At their head we should list the contribution of Gandhian nonviolence to the liberation of India, one of the world’s largest and most exploited nations. Since then we have seen other such contributions: to the largely nonviolent desegregation of the American South, the nonviolent transfer of power in South Africa, and the nonviolent expulsion of Soviet troops from Poland and Eastern Europe.

So it is from faith, rather than from logic, that I am committed to the optimistic prospect. I do so because of the rewards offered by that truth which, as Gandhi wrote, “is like a birth.”^.228 And I do so from faith, because, to quote Gandhi yet again, “Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs matchless and pure strength of faith.”²²⁹ Those of us who are old enough have seen such leaders of faith – Gandhi, King and Lech Walesa – arise to deal with what is humanly intolerable. I believe that we will see such leaders again.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "America’s Unchecked Security State: Part II: The Continuity of COG Detention Planning, 1948-2001," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 3, April 29, 2013.

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Notes

¹²³ Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 20-21; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (henceforth Church Committee, Book III), 411-17.

¹²⁴ Church Committee, Book III, 417.

¹²⁵ Church Committee, Book III, 420-21; quoting from Attorney-General Biddle’s directive to the FBI, 1943.

¹²⁶ Weiner, Enemies, 122: “[The Security Index] included – in addition to ‘both aliens and citizens of the United States [of] German, Italian, and Communist sympathies’ – radical labor leaders, journalists critical of the administration, writers critical of the FBI, and certain members of Congress.” In 1955 about half the names on the Security Index were transferred to a less punitive Communist Index (later renamed the Reserve Index), including “Professors, teachers, and educators: labor union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers newsmen and others in the mass media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” (Church Committee, Book II, 55. Among those included were Norman Mailer and Martin Luther King (Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 123).

¹²⁷ FBI, FBI Privacy Act Systems (63 FR 8659, 8671 / 02-20-98) link: “The following indices are no longer being used by the FBI and are being maintained at FBIHQ pending receipt of authority to destroy: Black Panther Party Photo Index; Black United Front Index; Security Index; and Wounded Knee Album.)

1) Administrative Index (ADEX). Consists of cards with descriptive data on individuals who were subject to investigation in a national emergency because they were believed to constitute a potential or active threat to the internal security of the United States. When ADEX was started in 1971, it was made up of people who were formerly on the Security Index, Reserve Index, and Agitator Index. This index is maintained in two separate locations in FBI Headquarters. ADEX was discontinued in January 1978. This list is inactive at FBI Headquarters and 29 Field Offices.”

¹²⁸ Weiner, Enemies, 161. Theoharis asserts however that Truman had already secretly approved the detention plan in 1948 (Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 151).

¹²⁹ Weiner, Enemies, 160-61. The primary targets for detention were Communist Party members and their supporters. Each detained person would eventually get a hearing, which under Hoover’s plan would “not be bound by the rules of evidence.” The plan was declassified in 2007; see “Hoover plan for mass arrests,” Public record media, February 2011, link. The FBI at this time became what Victor Navasky called “the vanguard of an extraordinary internal-security bureaucracy,” including the Subversive Activities Control Board established, over Truman’s veto, by the McCarran Act of 1950 (Victor Navasky, Naming Names, 22). That security bureaucracy has morphed today into a second, shadow government.

¹³⁰ Weiner, Enemies, 144-45.

¹³¹ Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 151, 158; cf. Church Committee, Book II.

¹³² Presidential Proclamation 2914 of December 16, 1950; reproduced in Brian Tuohy, Disaster Government: National Emergencies, Continuity of Government, & You (San Bernardino, CA: Mofo Press, 2013), 44-45.

¹³³ For NSA 68/4 of December 14, 1950, see FRUS, 1950, 1: 467–74; Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 322, etc.
*i Dennis Wainstock, Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 99.

¹³⁴ Matthew L. Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife: The Eisenhower Administration’s

Continuity-of-Government Plans and the Legacy of ‘Constitutional Dictatorship,’”

Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, Spring 2010, 7.

¹³⁵ Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], FEMA MANUAL 5400.2 111 (effective Feb. 29, 2000), link1 link2; quoted in Thronson, “Toward Comprehensive Reform of America’s Emergency Law Regime,” 762.

¹³⁶  FBI memo of June 19, 1958, to L.F. Boardman from A.H. Belmont (FBI HQ file 66-19016-6), reproduced in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Plans –Presidential Emergency Action Documents, 1958 – 1979, link.

¹³⁷  Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 7-8.

¹³⁸ Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 14.

¹³⁹ Hope Yen, “Eisenhower letters reveal doomsday plan: Citizens tapped to take over in case of attack,” AP, Deseret News, March 21, 2004, link. Other emergency responses to the launching of the Soviet sputnik included acceleration of the military programs to launch an American satellite, and the creation of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA), which developed the Internet.

¹⁴⁰ “Emergency Preparedness for Telecommunications,” attachment to memo of November 5, 1969, to Clay Whitehead [director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy under Nixon], from Charlie Joyce; reproduced at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/128597200/NSA-USCSB_1940-1980.

¹⁴¹ Tim Shorrock, Spies for hire: the secret world of intelligence outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008),72-75; Peter Dale Scott, “Continuity of Government: Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution?” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 29, 2010, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.

¹⁴² Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, link. For peripheral links between this network and the JFK assassination, see this article; also Larry Haapanen and Alan Rogers, “A Phone Call from Out of the Blue,” Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Vol, 8:2, link.

¹⁴³ Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events;” quoting Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.

¹⁴⁴ Ben Bradlee, Jr., Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North (New York: D.I. Fine, 1988), 132

¹⁴⁵ Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events;” citing Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23; Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16. For more on WISP, see David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973), 134-37.

¹⁴⁶ Cf. e.g. Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), “Promulgation and Administration of OSD Crisis Action Packages (CAPs),” December 13, 1990, link: “The Director. Crisis Coordination Center shall:
…. d. Develop and maintain an automated data base interfacing CAPs [Crisis Action Packages] with related presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) major emergency actions (MEAs), and Joint Staff fact sheets.” These programs were under the purview of the  Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who in 1990 was the neocon Paul Wolfowitz. Crisis Action Planning is today intensively developed inside and outside government: e.g. James L. Jacobs, Micheal C. Dorneich, and Patricia M. Jones, "Activity Representation and Management for Crisis Action Planning," 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San Diego CA, October 11-14, 1998. (Invited).

¹⁴⁷ Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 34 (coordinated); Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 71 (business). Cf. Weiner, Enemies, 15-16.

¹⁴⁸ Athan G, Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (New York: Bantam, 1990), 224-29; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 413; Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, 2004), 51 (Legion); Charles R. Geisst, Undue Influence: How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk (Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 139 (business).

¹⁴⁹ Alfred M. Lilienthal, “The Changing Role of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1993, link.

¹⁵⁰ Robert Friedman, “The ADL: The Jewish Thought Police,’” Village Voice, May 11, 1993; citing Henry Schwarzschild, SF Weekly, April 28, 1993.

¹⁵¹ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329 (Allen); 432 (Murchison, Kennedy, Rosenstiel); 470n (Kennedy).

¹⁵² Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329. Burton Hersh, claims that Hoover dined at Clint Murchison’s club in La Jolla, the del Charro, with John Roselli . Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 107. Cf. Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 393: “[S]ome of the director’s own wealthy friends were involved in dealings with the underworld.”

¹⁵³ Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 49; cf. 198.

¹⁵⁴ Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 189. Hoover’s refusal to investigate American organized crime was ended by the embarrassing news stories about the 1957 Apalachin, NY crime summit. After Robert Kennedy, then working for a Senate Subcommittee, approached the FBI for information, it developed that the FBI had no information at all on about forty of them. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), in contrast, “had something on every one of them” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 454n). In all, 58 mobsters were apprehended at Apalachin, while about fifty more escaped through the woods and fields. Cf. Gil Reavill, Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012).

¹⁵⁵ Summers, Official and Confidential, 228.

¹⁵⁶ Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 178.

¹⁵⁷ Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Berkeley: Westworks, 1977), 40; citing San Francisco Chronicle, September 26, 1974; January 11, 1975.

¹⁵⁸ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 218-21; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America (New York: Columbia UP, 1994),213.

¹⁵⁹ Weiner, Enemies, 487. In like manner, when Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family avoided conviction for the murder of the left-wing journalist Carlo Tresca in 1943, a sycophantic admirer of Hoover and Winchell, Guenther Reinhardt, blamed the murder on the Communists (Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010), 296; cf. Thomas A. Reppetto, Battleground New York City: Countering Spies, Saboteurs, and Terrorists since 1861 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2012), 190-94.

¹⁶⁰ Howie Carr, Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger's Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld (New York: Forge Books, 2011), 170ss.

¹⁶¹ Boston Globe, September 6, 2006, link.

¹⁶² John Kroger, Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 146-52, etc.

¹⁶³ Lance, Triple Cross, 221-38, etc.

¹⁶⁴ Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 34.

¹⁶⁵ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 341-50; Henry T. Gallagher, James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot: A Soldier's Story (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2012), ZZ (twenty thousand).

¹⁶⁶ Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & brothers : the days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Pub., 1999), 186, 188.

¹⁶⁷ Summeres, Not in Your Lifetime, 162.

¹⁶⁸ Scott, Deep Politics, 49-50.

¹⁶⁹ A few days before the JFK assassination, the source, Joseph Milteer, also told Miami police informant Willie Somersett that the president would be shot “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.” FBI HQ received this information on November 10, 1963; but did not transmit it to the Warren Commission (in a rewritten form making it less credible) until August 7, 1964, when the Commission had already written its report and was winding up its work. Meanwhile FBI HQ had ordered its Miami office to “amend the reliability statement to show that some of the information …could not be verified or corroborated.” See Scott, Deep Politics, 49-51. Thus in August 1968 the FBI ignored a credible report from Somersett connecting a Klan murderer, Tommy Tarrants (of whom more shortly) to the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis four months before (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God,  95-97).

¹⁷⁰ Although the Klan were generally people with little status in society, Tommy Tarrants told Patsy Sims that one of the people responsible for planning the White Klan violence in which he participated was “a high-ranking military officer” (Patsy Sims, The Klan (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 240).

¹⁷¹ Maryanne Vollers, Ghosts of Mississippi: the murder of Medgar Evers, the trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the haunting of the new South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 229-30; quoted in Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2010), 125.

¹⁷² Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 33; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 313.

¹⁷³ Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 314.

¹⁷⁴ Weiner, Enemies, 247.

¹⁷⁵ Glenn Peter Hastedt, , ed., Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations: An Encyclopedia of American Espionage (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 180. One of the agents later commented, “There would be a Klan meeting with ten people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day” (Weiner, Enemies, 247).

¹⁷⁶ Hastedt, , ed., Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations, 180. By way of comparison, the FBI COINTELPRO against the Socialist Workers’ Party, over a much longer period, involved only 208 operations.

¹⁷⁷ Steven E Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 24.

¹⁷⁸ Weiner, Enemies, 244.

¹⁷⁹ Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A Comprehensive Guide, 70; Anthony Villano, Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1977); M. Susan Orr Klopfer, Fred Klopfer, Barry Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited ([Fort Madison, Iowa?]: M.S. Orr, 2006), 399.

¹⁸⁰Sandra Harmon, Mafia Son: The Scarpa Mob Family, the FBI, and a Story of Betrayal (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010), 57-64; Peter Lance, Cover Up

What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror, link; Richard H. Stratton, Altered States of America: Icons And Outlaws, Hitmakers And Hitmen (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 226-27.

¹⁸¹ Fredric L. Dannen "The G-Man and the Hit Man,” New Yorker, December 16, 1996, link. The involvement of Scarpa in the two earlier investigations has been challenged (Jerry Mitchell , “A mobster takes on the KKK,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger,

February 17, 2010); but on the basis of evidence introduced into the trial of Scarpa’s FBI handler Lindley DeVecchio, the interpretation of which has itself been challenged (Brad Hamilton, New York Post, May 27, 2012, link; Lance, Triple Cross,, 421-25; Jack Cashill, “The Trials of Angela Clemente: Why the Department of Justice is Destroying America's Best PI,” WorldNetDaily.com, May 31, 2007, link).

¹⁸² Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 25: “The FBI would connect the White Knights with more than three hundred acts of racial violence.”

¹⁸³ Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 20: ”Sam Bowers had himself targeted King for murder and … was part of a network that had incited and planned attacks on King over a period of years.”

¹⁸⁴ Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 275. In contrast Hoover should be severely faulted for his obstruction of the investigation of the Martin Luther King assassination. FBI files contained evidence which, if “collated and cross-referenced…could have developed a powerful circumstantial case for a conspiracy to murder King [against Bowers and followers of an allied racist, Wesley Swift].” But after the FBI had developed evidence pointing to James Earl Ray as the assassin, “Hoover issued a directive to several field offices…to ‘hold all leads in abeyance concerning whereabouts and activities of various individuals, including Dr. Wesley Swift, in view of the present information regarding Galt [i.e. Ray]’” (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 253, 256).

¹⁸⁵ Jack Nelson, Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 147-48.

¹⁸⁶ Nelson, Scoop, 146-52. Cf. David Mark Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 83-86.

¹⁸⁷ Nelson, Scoop, 150, 152. Cf. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 362-63. Tarrants, who became a repentant born-again Christian while in prison, later discounted the entrapment issue: “My feelings are,,,that I was a willing participant” (Patsy Sims, The Klan,  243; cf. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 363).

¹⁸⁸ One person forgiving the FBI was the repentant Tarrants: “if I were an FBI agent faced with the situation there in Mississippi in that particular time, I would not hesitate to use the same methods they used to get me” (Sims, The Klan, 243).

¹⁸⁹ Nelson, Scoop, 152.

¹⁹⁰ Nelson, Scoop, 150.

¹⁹¹ George Michael, Confronting Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA (London: Routledge, 2003), 128. Cf. Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 91-95.

¹⁹² Jim Douglass, Gandhi and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 83.

¹⁹³ Hoover gave increasing signs of being out of touch, even senile (Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI [New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002], 172). Meanwhile leadership in the once nonviolent SDS passed to people like Bernardine Dohrn, who said in a 1970 address to an SDS convention, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson” (Vincent Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: the True Story of the Manson Murders [New York: W.W. Norton, c1994], 297).    

¹⁹⁴ Cf. Ray Wannall’s not wholly unfriendly assessment of his former colleague Sullivan: “With respect to some of Sullivan’s FBI associates referring to him as ‘Crazy Bill,’ there surely were signs of certain irrationalities on his part beginning about a year before he retired from the FBI [in 1971]…. Those of us who came to know him well felt that he may have suffered a mental collapse the last year or so he was in the Bureau, perhaps brought on by his obsession to become FBI Director” (Wannall. The Real J. Edgar Hoover, 146).

¹⁹⁵ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621; Scott, Deep Politics, 308-09.

¹⁹⁶ Frank J. Donner, The age of surveillance: the aims and methods of America's political intelligence system (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 223; quoted in Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621-22n: “more specifically it [the FBI] engaged in a conspiracy to deprive individuals of their constitutionally protected rights.”

¹⁹⁷ “The Hunt for Red Menace: - 4, Information Collection & Sharing,” Political Research Associates, link.

¹⁹⁸ “By 1970 Sullivan was, largely unbeknownst to Hoover, almost obsessively pursuing factions of the New Left, pushing field offices to open files on every known individual affiliated with SDS or living on a commune. Such excesses were halted only when hey were discovered by another assistant director, Inspection Division head W. Mark Felt” (David Cunningham, There's something happening here: the New Left, the Klan, and FBI [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 253).

¹⁹⁹ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 687-88. Cf. Ray Wannall. The Real J. Edgar Hoover: For the Record (Paducah, KY: Turner Pub., 2000), 145-46. The Angleton-Sullivan alliance may have developed after their collaboration in 1964 to establish a common FBI-CIA version of how John F. Kennedy was killed. Cf. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 646; Scott, Deep Politics II, 20. However Mark Riebling writes that the Angleton-Sullivan mostly developed (unknown to Hoover) after Hoover terminated formal liaison with the CIA in 1970 (Mark Riebling, Wedge: the secret war between the FBI and CIA [New York: Knopf, 1994], 276).

²⁰⁰  Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670); Nelson, Scoop, 157 (‘ferret”).”

²⁰¹ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670-72. Cf. B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 500.

²⁰² Loch K. Johnson, America's secret power: the CIA in a democratic society

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145; Joan Hoff, Nixon reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 243.

²⁰³ “Huston’s legacy lived on in a way he could not have anticipated…. Nixon had formally approved this extension of buggings and break-ins…. The president wanted this development; some of the official organs of the state were frustrating his wishes…. When in the following year the next peril presented itself, the urge for the White House to take over and run some police functions itself was irresistible” (Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Random House/ Times Books, 1994), 28; emphasis in original). Cf. Hoff, Nixon reconsidered, 243-44.

²⁰⁴ Dennis Hevesi, “William Anderson, Navy Hero, Dies at 85,’ New York Times, March 6, 2007, link.

²⁰⁵ Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 666.

²⁰⁶ Church Committee, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, especially pp. 10-11. 33-61. 

²⁰⁷ The two men (Edward Miller and Mark Felt) were pardoned by Reagan in 1981, while their cases were still on appeal.

²⁰⁸ Samuel P. Huntington, The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies (Trilateral Commission Report; New York: New York University Press, 1976),

²⁰⁹ John Prados, Safe for Democracy: the secret wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 435-36: “The [Ford] White House saw the [congressional] inquiries as a major threat.”
^*ii John Prados, Safe for Democracy: the secret wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 435-36: “The [Ford] White House saw the [congressional] inquiries as a major threat.”
^*iii Scott, Road to 9/11, 98.

²¹⁰ Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2006), 36. For an extended analysis of the Ford-Rumsfeld-Cheney-inspired  “counterattack” on the various congressional investigations of the FBI and CIA, and its overall success, see Kathryn Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government: the post-Watergate investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 147-89.

²¹¹ “Veto Battle 30 Years Ago Set Freedom of Information Norms:

Scalia, Rumsfeld, Cheney Opposed Open Government Bill.” National Security Archive, November 23, 2004, link.

²¹² Scott, Road to 9/11, especially pp. 50-113; Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government, 177-78.

²¹³ Cf. Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government, 180-81.

²¹⁴ Scott, Road to 9/11, 132: “Wilson even put an extra $200 million into the CIA’s Afghan pipeline in 1991, after the Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan.”

²¹⁵ Newsweek, November 30, 1964. Hoover added, off the record, “He is one of the lowest characters in the country” (Church Committee, Book III, 157). For the illegalities in Hoover’s obsessive campaign to destroy King, see Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 571-75; Church Committee, Book III, 158-61.

²¹⁶ This same homeostatic impulse explains his use of the FBI to reinforce public myths about the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. According to Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, FBI files contained evidence which, if “collated and cross-referenced…could have developed a powerful circumstantial case for a conspiracy to murder King [against Bowers, Tarrants, and others].” But after the FBI had developed evidence pointing to James Earl Ray as the assassin, “Hoover issued a directive to several field offices…to ‘hold all leads in abeyance concerning whereabouts and activities of various individuals, including Dr. Wesley Swift, in view of the present information regarding Galt [i.e. Ray]’” (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 253, 256).

²¹⁷ Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 275, etc.

²¹⁸ Having surprised myself by coming to this relatively benign assessment of Hoover, I was pleased and again surprised to find it corroborated by Burton Hersh (Bobby and J. Edgar, 514-15).

²¹⁹ Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: strategy, forces and resources for a new century (Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century, [2000]), 51.

Contrary to what some have suggested, the focus of this transformation was clearly on forcing the Department of Defense, for the sake of “military preeminence,” “to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs.” But to fulfill the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz PNAC agenda of future preemptive wars, it was also vital to shift America to the more robust techniques we have since seen for silencing antiwar opposition.

²²⁰ Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

²²¹ Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 277. No fiscal cliff threatens CACI’s growth. In April 2013 its website advertised 1,014 job openings for people with security clearances, along with another 46 job openings with no clearance required.

²²² Katrina vanden Heuvel, “The Corporate 'Predator State.’” Washington Post, March 26, 2013.

²²³ Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 275; quoting CIA general counsel John Rizzo.

²²⁴ Judge Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court, commenting on the case of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, whose felony charges were dropped in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. Judge Bennett said that it was "unconscionable" to charge a defendant with a list of serious crimes that could have resulted in 35 years in prison, only to drop all of the major charges on the eve of trial. For more on the Drake case, see Jane Mayer, “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” New Yorker, May 23, 2011, link.

Obama’s behavior is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s, who was elected after promising to reduce the defense budget, but presided instead over a huge increase. I suspect that neither president was duplicitous; rather, they are just less powerful than the covert processes over which they preside.

²²⁵ Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 132.

²²⁶ Some might wish to add to this list General MacArthur in 1952 and General Westmoreland in 1968.

²²⁷  Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, “Dr. King’s ‘Two Americas’ Truer Now than Ever,” Moyers @ Company, April 10, 2013, http://billmoyers.com/2013/04/10/dr-king%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ctwo-americas%E2%80%9D-truer-now-than-ever/: "Walmart’s one of those companies laying people off, but according to the website Business Insider, the mega-chain’s CEO Michael Duke gets paid 1,034 times more than his average worker.“ As a matter of fact, “In the past 30 years, compensation for chief executives in America has increased 127 times faster than the average worker’s salary.”

²²⁸ Young India, December 15, 1921; in Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas: an Anthology (New York: Vintage, 1963), 150.

²²⁹ Mahatma Gandhi, “Towards Realization,” in Works (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, [1958]-1994), Vol. 88, 185.

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