The fact that this interview was conducted almost twenty
years ago may make it more valuable than if it were done today. I think it offers a wider perspective.
When it happened, this was a conversation and not an
interview so the agent involved had no idea I would be sharing his thoughts and
opinions. Both he and his wife have
passed on and I’ve altered their names, so I don’t feel like I’m betraying any
confidences.
When
my husband and I moved into our new home the couple next door, Bill, and Becky,
invited us over for dinner. While we
were being shown around their home I noticed a photograph of a young Marine on
the fireplace mantle. When I asked Bill
if that was him standing in front of Mount Suribachi, on the island of Iwo
Jima, clutching an M1 Thompson submachine gun, I made an instant friend for
life. When I properly identified the
similar Thompson, hanging on the wall, he was impressed. It turned out we were both firearms
collectors and I liked his guns and he liked mine.
Over
the next year we had many conversations about his life as a Marine and his
subsequent career in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He often commented, not so jokingly, that our
conversations were the only time his interactions with the Japanese people
ended peacefully.
Eventually
we got around to the details of his career with the FBI. He’d joined the FBI shortly after getting out
of the Marine Corps when the Bureau was hiring Marines and accountants. Oddly, he started out with less than positive
comments. He wasn’t a fan of FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover. He cited
Hoover’s hypocrisy, his personal perversions, and his disregard for the law
and/or the Constitution. He made many
comments similar to the quotes below.
All emphasis is my own:
During the Cold
War, Hoover intensified his personal anti-Communist, anti-subversive stance and
increased the FBI’s surveillance activities.
Frustrated over limitations placed on the Justice Department’s
investigative capabilities, he created the Counter
Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The group conducted a series of
covert, and oftentimes illegal, investigations designed to discredit or disrupt
radical political organizations.
Initially, Hoover ordered background checks on government employees to
prevent foreign agents from infiltrating the government. Later, COINTELPRO went after any organization
Hoover considered subversive, including the Black Panthers, the
Socialist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Hoover also used
COINTELPRO’s operations to conduct his own personal vendettas against
political adversaries in the name of national security. Labeling Martin Luther King “the most
dangerous Negro in the future of this nation,” Hoover ordered around-the-clock
surveillance on King, hoping to find evidence of Communist influence or sexual
deviance. Using illegal wiretaps and
warrantless searches, Hoover gathered a large file of what he considered
damning evidence against King.
In 1971, COINTELPRO’s tactics were revealed to the public, showing that the
agency’s methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planted
evidence and false rumors leaked on suspected groups and individuals. Despite the
harsh criticism Hoover and the Bureau received, he remained its director until
his death on May 2, 1972, at the age of 77.[1]
The same article goes on to comment on Hoovers legacy:
J. Edgar Hoover shaped the F.B.I in his own image of discipline
and patriotism. He also directed the
bureau into secret and illegal domestic surveillance spurred on by his
conservative patriotism and paranoia.
His nefarious tactics had been suspected for
decades by government officials, but presidents from Truman to Nixon seemed
unable to fire him due to his popularity and the potentially high political
cost. In 1975, the Church Committee
(named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church [D-Idaho]) conducted a full
investigation of COINTELPRO’s operations and concluded that many of the
agency’s tactics were illegal and, in many, cases unconstitutional.[2]
Bill, who’d spent twenty years in the FBI, eventually, back in 2000, gave an extremely harsh review of the organization. He told me that criticism of the FBI usually went something like, “The organization may have some bad apples at the top, but the rank and file members are, to a man, honest, hardworking, loyal agents.” He ended his comment with, “That’s a load of BS. It’s corrupted from the top to the bottom.”
I was somewhat shocked, and it must
have shown on my face, because he ended his condemnation with, “How do
you think a young go-getter advances his career in a corrupted
organization? He doesn’t do it by being
squeaky clean. He does it by becoming as
corrupted as those who evaluate his performance.” I suddenly had a new appreciation of the
workings of Government agencies and especially what’s referred to, today, as “The
Deep State.”
Bill mentioned a habit of J. Edgar
Hoover’s that many would have found amusing, but Bill never found anything
about the FBI to be amusing. He
mentioned Hoover’s penchant for conducting
after-hours inspections of the Bureau’s locker room. Mr. Hoover had an unpublished requirement that he enforced when he felt the need. He had a minimum acceptable shirt neck size and hat size. Anyone falling below his minimums were relegated to some insignificant Bureau backwater because Hoover wouldn’t, “have any pin-heads or pencil-necks in his organization.” It’s a shame J. Edgar Hoover’s and a certain pencil-neck’s lives didn’t overlap by more than twelve years. The interaction between Hoover and Representative Adam Schiff could have been interesting.
Bill entered the FBI in 1946, right after he got out of the Marine Corps and he retired
sometime in 1966. According to him the Bureau was corrupted that entire time. If we’ve
been paying any attention at all, we know the FBI, and other Government agencies, have played an important role in the subversion of the Trump presidency and the execution of at least two coup attempts not to mention what could be construed as the largest conspiracy in history.
One of the FBI’s major roles, along with the NSA, the National Security Agency, and the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency was, and still is, compiling dossiers on anyone and everyone of any importance. Anyone, even remotely aware, should be able to comprehend the reasons and motivations behind the clandestine, and often illegal, gathering of compromising information on people in high places. Leverage and blackmail are two reasons that come to mind.
Bill contended that Director Hoover expended too much time and too many resources collecting information, dossiers if you please, on people and organizations that were not being investigated for any other legitimate reasons. Bill alluded to the possibility that particular habit is what kept Mr. Hoover in charge of the FBI until the day he died.
Once I asked Bill about Director Hoover’s personal relationship with Clyde Tolson, his second in command from 1930 until 1972. I watched Bill recoil, in disgust, before he politely informed me, “Kim, decent people don’t speak of such things in polite company. The fact they’re buried in the same cemetery a few yards from each other should tell you all you need to know.”
I’ve been holding this article for
some time. I was waiting for an opportunity
to tie it in with some major announcement from the media. That opportunity happened on Saturday, 25
April 2020, when the Patriot Crier published the article, “A.G.
Barr’s Conundrum: Give Traitorous Coup Plotters a Pass or Tear Down Institutions
Viewed as Essential to Security of U.S..”
That article can be viewed here. Should that disappear from the Internet a pdf
copy of the article can be found here.
A .pdf copy of this article can be
downloaded here.