FBI in Society: The Nationwide Chilling Effect

(This is the second part of a two-part analysis of the papers and speeches presented at a two-day conference on the Federal Bureau of Investigation sponsored by the Committee for Public Justice and the Woodrow Wilson School of Government. Part One appeared in Friday's Crimson. The persons quoted were participants in the conference.)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has become an important fixture in the American psyche. Young white boys dream of growing up to be one of the Bureau's strong-jawed, clean-shaven Special Agents; car thieves and kidnappers fear its relentless pursuit; leftists and antiwar organizers wonder if Agents are tapping their telephones, reading their mail, infiltrating their meetings. Business, labor, and political leaders all fear and depend on the Bureau's wide information-gathering and dissemination powers.

The FBI's penetration of the national economic and political life was not the result of an accident. Almost all of the features of the FBI's growth--its political role as the domestic intelligence agency of the American government, its economic role as an important aid to the corporate structures which control the nation's marketplace, its social role as a compelling role-model for the traditional American boy-have come about as the result of conscious decisions by J. Edgar Hoover and his superiors in government.

The growth of the Bureau's image is a classic example. Hoover did not win the nation's heart by his silent devotion to duty; rather, he consciously carved out his niche by means of a concentrated campaign of public relations. Most observers of the FBI trace the beginning of the campaign to the Kansas City Massacre of 1933--a cold blooded-shoot-out in which Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd and a group of hoolums attempted to free one of their cohorts who was being taken to prison. Although the plan failed. FBI Special Agents and a local police chief died in the gun battle, which took place in broad daylight in front of the Kansas City Railroad depot.

Hoover was shocked by the flagrant lawlessness of the attack. Criminals like John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Ma Barker, and Alvin "Old Creepy" Karpis had captured the public imagination; movies and newspaper accounts portrayed them as misguided but romantic outlaws fighting the system which had caused the Depression. Hoover must have felt that an entire generation of American children was threatened by the growth of this myth, and he determined to offer an alternative model: the FBI director and his corps of brave Special Agents.

Hoover hired a famous Washington newsman--Henry Suydam of the old Brooklyn Eagle--to teach him the skills of public relations and image-making. Within a year he had learned them so well that he was able to dismiss his flack, and carry the Bureau's public relations himself. He has done so with great success ever since.

He began publishing monthly articles in major magazines detailing the success of the FBI against the most famous criminals of the day, with titles such as "Buzzard in Disguise," and "the Meanest Man I Ever Knew," to drive home the point that criminals were not admirable figures. He also began allowing magazine and book writers to enter the Bureau and produce highly favorable articles about himself and the enemies. He wrote introductions for books with titles such as Ten Thousand Public Enemies and Our FBI: An Inside Story.

G. Man (starring the former criminal hero, James Cagny) and You Can't Get Away With It educated the screen audience about the omniscience and implacability of the Bureau and its Director. War on Crime, a comic strip drawn by a close personal friend of Hoover's, drew on FBI files for its plots. A highly successful radio series, The FBI--In Peace and War, captivated a nationwide listening audience. Thousands of children sent in boxtops for Junior G-Man badges and pictures of Hoover.

The campaing was a bananza for the entertainment industry, the newspapers, and the FBI. FBI pictures were guaranteed a wide audience; Pictures of Hoover eating a 'G-Man Sandwich' at Toots Shor's were great filler for the Saturday editions; the FBI became a cultural ideal.

The blitz has kept up. The House on 92nd St. and Walk East on Beacon--both featuring dozens of Special Agents on loan from the Bureau as actors--explained the FBI's role in capturing Nazi saboteurs and the Rosenbergs. I Was a Communist for the FBI and a short-lived television series. I Led Three Lives, glorified the special agent and his most vital tool, the political informer.

The culmination of this selling campaign of course, is the highly successful ABC television series. "The FBI," now in its seventh season. The FBI collaborated in producing the series with a precise calculation of what it could accomplish for the Bureau, and it maintains particularly strict controls over the series. It gave permission for the show--which a number of studios had been seeking since television began--at a time when criticism of the FBI was rising, from citizens who suggested that the Bureau had been derelict in protecting President Kennedy and providing protection to civil rights workers in the South.

Cartha DeLoach, assistant director of the Bureau, explained that the decision had been made because "we thought it was time to clarify what the Bureau does. We can't protect people--like civil rights workers, for example."

The FBI retains veto power over all casting, a Special Agent takes part in all the series's script conferences and is permanently assigned to supervise the shooting, and the final scripts are sent to Washington for approval. Hoover watches the show faithfully, and he told a Congressional subcommittee that he felt, the show was useful in maintaining the Buerau's image. When Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.) began an inquiry into the effects of violence on television. Hoover called producer Quinn Martin, and the violence on "The FBI" dipped: "We have made an adjustment," Martin said later, "and I don't think it's hurt us any. Our ratings have gone up."

Beyond maintaining an image for the great mass of the American people, the Bureau has a specific profile which it projects toward its target groups: those seeking radical social change. The documents stolen from the FBI resident agency in Media, Pa., and later released to the public by the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI make clear the way in which the FBI uses its identity to intimidate radicals. In a memo from FBI headquarters, agents were urged to increase the numbers of interviews they conducted with radicals, not for investigative purposes, but because it would "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The social control and phone tapping image projection used against radical groups is the mission of the vast political intelligence apparatus of the FBI. Hoover began gathering political intelligence after an order in 1936 by Franklin D. Roosevelt charging him to prepare for war by amassing information on groups likely to commit sabotage in the event of war. John Elliff termed this order the "Magna Carta of domestic intelligence." Hoover has operated on its authority ever since.

The vital source of this political control is the FBI informer system. "The informer system is subject to the same forms of organization and control as other agencies of the government with which you may be more familiar." Frank Donner told the conference. Donner's thesis--that the extragovernmental informer system is intended as a permanent, organized arm of repression, which has as its aim the management of certain parts of American political life--is supported by the FBI time card displayed by Turner. Each agent, it would seem is assigned a quota of informers to produce, regardless of the magnitude of the "internal danger" to the nation at the time or in his area. In his paper. Turner cities the internal controversy in the FBI over a new type of informer added in the late Sixties: "Racial Informant (Ghetto)." The "Racial Informant" was hired to infiltrate specific black militant organizations. The "Racial Informant--Ghetto" is a resident of a black or brown ghetto who comes into contact with a large number of the residents every day: e.g., a bartender, barber, newsstand owner, etc. This informer is paid to keep an ear open for rumblings of impending riots or demonstrations, without actively attempting to penetrate a group.

When the classification was added, each FBI office was ordered to obtain a number of "Racial Informants--Ghetto." Heads of offices in rural areas immediately protested, pointing out that in their area there were no ghettos. After bureaucratic consultation, the FBI headquarters devised a notation to be written on reports from these bureaus to explain their failure to comply with the order.

"The recruitment of informers is intended as a restraint on free expression, as a curb on movements for change." Donner wrote.

There is abundant evidence to support his charge. Robert Wall, a former Special Agent who had been assigned to political intelligence gathering in Washington. D.C., told the conference of one occasion on which he was ordered to investigate a school run by a black organization. After placing four informers inside the school, he concluded that it was engaged in educational activities and sent a report to his superiors stating that it was a school and recommending that surveillance be stopped.

His superiors shot back a memo accusing him of being "Native," and ordering him to continue the surveillance (Wall later resigned from the FBI because, he said, "the type of crushing of human relationships that resulted from our investigations was more than I could take."). It is obvious that the FBI hierarchy had already evaluated the school before assigning surveillance.

During the Fifties, Donner writes, the Bureau would often order informers who had infiltrated the Communist Party to join other organizations which it wished to investigate. The presence of the informer was then cited in reports as evidence of Communist penetration of the group, and informers were hired to penetrate it.

Informers are seldom used as witnesses in court, both Donner and Turner said, because "surfacing" an informer would mean his agent would then be forced to recruit another informer. Informers themselves, once they have accepted their status, are often reluctant to give it up, because doing so would mean the end of their regular salary payments, which in some cases have been as high as $75 a week.

Veteran leftists assume as a matter of course that their public meetings are penetrated by informers. This assumption is most likely true: the groups which informers have been sent into range from The Klan to the Weathermen to almost every Black student group to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Because the FBI informer is considered a permanent feature of political life by the target groups, organizers have developed some reticence about trusting every new recruit in their ranks. The informer must win their trust: usually he attempts this by adopting a more militant line than the rest of the rank and file. By showing great political zeal and uncompromising devotion to the cause, he hopes to be recognized as one of the initiate and moved into a position of trust.

An informer for the FBI in Seattle who infiltrated the Seattle Eight Defense Committee, told the conference tHat he had formed a plan with a group of Seattle radicals to blow up a bridge--but that he had, with the approval of the Bureau, prepared a booby-trapped bomb which would blow up the person who set it. The plan was never carried out, and the FBI denies that it knew or approved of the plan. Given the unstable nature of informers, the denial is very probably true--but it was the Bureau, after all, which injected him into the political life of Seattle, whether or not they approved his most blatant outrages.

Beyond corrupting the political conduct of the American left--and, to a much smaller extent, the American right--the FBI maintains a network of controls over the conduct of the American legal and economic system. FBI penetration of the law-enforcement community in the United States has grown to such an extent that some policemen themselves have become alarmed that it may be turning into a super-police agency.

The Bureau has for years published an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, directed at local police officials and rural sheriffs (the Bulletin is not to be shown to laymen, and carries a warning to that effect in each issue; it is intended for policemen alone). The Bulletin includes articles by Hoover and his associates along with tips on scientific crime detection, political analyses with a law-and-order theme (one recent issue carried an article by Supreme Court nominee Lewis F. Powell), and plugs for the FBI's police aid and training programs such as the FBI National Crime Information Center and National Law Enforcement Academy.

The National Academy conducts 12-week training programs for local policemen: the Bureau modestly named it the "West Point of Law Enforcement." Many local police officials have said that this training increases the professionalism of local police forces--particularly those too small to have rigorous training programs. The two police chiefs at the Princeton conference--Vincent Broderick, former police commissioner of New York City, and Jerry Ahearn, police commissioner of New Haven. Conn.--agreed, however, that the training was worse than useless for a modern, urban police force.

But whatever the objective effect of the FBI's training programs on police performance, there is one other effect: it staffs police forces across the country with officers who are in close sympathy with the FBI and who are willing to work with it. In addition, small police forces and sheriff's offices across the country are staffed with former agents who can be counted on to share information and cooperate in Bureau investigations.

The close cooperation with local police forces has become a subject of controversy throughout the Deep South. Terrill Glenn, a former U.S. attorney in South Carolina, told the conference that the FBI had not conducted any meaningful investigation of the shootings of four black students at Orangeburg, S.C. because the agents were close friends with the Highway Patrolmen who had done the shooting. Andrew Young, a veteran SCLC organizer, told the conference that civil rights groups had met with an outstanding lack of success in seeking FBI investigation of harassment beatings and shootings of civil rights workers in the deep South because the Bureau was unwilling to invade the domain of local sheriffs. Vern Countryman, professor of Law, said, "When it comes to Civil Rights, the FBI's position is that while it can shoot airline hijackers and John Dillinger, it has no law enforcement powers. So FBI agents stand by taking notes while a lawyer for the Justice Department's Civil Rights division is pummelled on the street."

The FBI has also linked virtually every police department in the country electronically into its National Crime Information Center, which maintains a computerized file of all wanted persons in the country. Until last year, police departments seeking to know whether a suspect was wanted elsewhere in the country had to wait days or weeks while the Bureau searched the file manually. Now, they can query the computer directly, without going through the Bureau, and an answer is often forth-coming in a matter of seconds.

The Bureau also maintains a National Criminal History file, linked to local police by the same computer teletype. An estimated 30,000,000 persons--roughly 30 per cent of all adult Americans--have entries in this file. Although it is called a "Criminal History" file, it consists in large part of records simply showing that an individual has been arrested and released or acquitted.

The "National Criminal History" file has brought the FBI into the nation's economic life as a broker of employment for private and semi-private corporations. To corporations. Aryeh Neier wrote in his paper for the conference, the decision to hire or not to hire someone is a matter of statistics. While an individual may not have done anything, statistically a number of those who have been arrested are criminals. The safest bet is not to hire anyone who has ever been arrested at all.

Although the information in the file is intended for law enforcement purposes, local police and FBI offices regularly make it available to banks, insurance companies, and other government agencies, Neier said. In some cases, this is done on an informal reciprocal basis--the banks responding by willingly making available bank records of persons under investigation without the necessity of a subpoena. In many cases, however, the arrests records are used under legal requirements; as an example, a New York State law requires that all prospective employees of securities firms be checked against the arrest records. Neier concluded that as long as such a file is extant, it will be used to punish persons who have not been convicted of any crime by depriving them of a livelihood.

The Bureau's usefulness as an employment agency is not the only interface between the FBI and the American corporate structure. FBI agents often find lucrative jobs with corporations after leaving the Bureau. Turner reports that certain corporations--such as Sears-Roebuck and the Ford Motor Co.--were know to all agents in the Bureau as good places to apply. Ford employs nearly 30 agents in its central management, dozens more in subsidiaries (not surprisingly, Ford sponsored "The FBI" during its early years on television). The Society of Former Agents of the FBI, an independent alumni organization set up to keep those who have left the Bureau in touch with the "FBI family," maintains a placement bureau which finds good jobs for its members.

Former agents dominate the private security industry; Fidelifacts, Inc., and The Wackenhut Agency, two of the largest nationwide investigation and protection firms, are both headed and largely staffed by former agents. Vince Gillen, the private investigator for General Motors who sought damaging information on Ralph Nader, is a former agent.

The FBI also has alumni in government and the bureaucracy, including the current head of the Secret Service, nearly a dozen Congressmen, the Attorney General of California, and the Governor of New Jersey.

The increasing penetration of the FBI into local law enforcement, government, private industry, and citizens' political affairs, some participants in the conference felt, could lead to a nationwide surveillance mentality, a society-wide "chilling effect."

The "chilling effect" is a legal term describing deadening of free expression caused by government intervention. When the FBI takes an interest in lawful activities of citizens, even those who know that they have done nothing wrong--those most convinced that activities of which the Bureau disapproves are nonetheless legitimate--aften have a momentary feeling that they just may be guilty of something.

The effect on those less committed to the conduct which has made them surveillance objects--e.g., a young man or woman simply toying with the idea of entering a political group which the Bureau does not sanction--is much more severe. Government investigation of an activity marks it as illicit and dangerous. Its objects might reasonably fear that they will have difficulty getting jobs and will be shunned by suspicious neighbors. A widespread surveillance mentality could deaden our political life and make movements for change nearly impossible.

In his paper on informers. Frank Donner cites an extreme case of the effects of the surveillance mentality. Ernest A. Weiners, a professor at New York State University, committed suicide in 1967 after it was revealed that the FBI had recruited on of his academic colleagues as an informer to gather information on his activities in a civil rights group. In a letter found after his death. Wiener wrote. "It is too painful to continue living in a world in which freedom of expression is steadily being constricted in the name of freedom and in which peace means war, in which every one of our institutions, our schools, our churches, our newspapers, our industries are being steadily engulfed in a sea of hypocrisy.