The Burglary by Betty Medsger Read Free Book Online Page B

1968.
    This group plans to blow up underground electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C., area in order to disrupt federal government operations. The plotters are also concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official. The name of a White House staff member has been mentioned as a possible victim. If successful, the plotters would demand an end to United States bombing operations in Southeast Asia and the release of all political prisoners as ransom. Intensive investigation is being conducted concerning this matter.
    It was a bombshell.
    Hoover had arranged to have a member of his staff call selected journalists and tell them that the director’s testimony from the closed hearing would be available when the hearing ended. The FBI staffer assured reporters they were going to get a big story. As Hoover concluded his remarks, Mohr gave copies of Hoover’s twenty-seven-page prepared statement to the clerk of the Senate committee and asked him to distribute them to the reporters who were waiting outside the closed hearing room door.
    The director was so eager for the claims he made to have the widest possible public exposure that two weeks later, on December 11, he published a booklet containing his by then well-known “secret” testimony and had itmailed to journalists, public officials, business leaders, and other influential people throughout the country. In a cover letter sent with the booklet, Hoover wrote, “It is my hope that through this document a better understanding will result of the work and problems facing the FBI.” The distribution of his testimony—first to journalists that day and later in the widely mailed booklet—marked the first time in the bureau’s history that the director had made public unproven allegations about criminal acts by specific people who had not been charged.
    It was not known at the time that Hoover’s plan to make these accusations public had alarmed his top aides so much that they had tried to convince him not to include the accusations against the Berrigans in his testimony. By taking this step, his aides risked the possibility of being transferred to unacceptable posts or, worse, being fired and blackballed from future work in any law enforcement agency. That had recently happened to one agent in retaliation for rather gentle criticism. But because his top aides thought that what Hoover was about to do was a serious mistake, they took the extraordinary step of violating his complete lack of tolerance of criticism.
    They knew Hoover had been told a few weeks earlier that the FBI and theInternal Security Division of the Department of Justice had investigated these allegations against the Berrigans and others and had decided that there was insufficient evidence to support them.Charles D. Brennan, assistant to the director, was so upset when he saw the accusations in an advance copy of the director’s testimony that he wrote a memo to Hoover urging that his remarks about the Berrigans be deleted. In his memo, Brennan told Hoover that his plea that the accusations not be made public had been endorsed by all agents in the Domestic Intelligence Division, the largest division in the bureau and the division that had investigated the allegations. William C. Sullivan, assistant director, third in command at the bureau, and in the bureau for thirty years by this time, also sent Hoover a memo advising him not to make the accusations against the Berrigans.
    It was an unprecedented instance of FBI officials banding together to oppose an action by Hoover. Instead of following their advice, he violated basic principles of due process and made sweeping public charges about accusations he knew had been determined to be without merit. In addition to whatever concerns his aides had about the unfairness of the accusations becoming public, they were concerned that by making these allegations the director would be violating the