Federal Bureau of Corruption

The Truth Shall Bring You Hatred

“All you motherfuckers come out or we’ll blow their heads off!” an LAPD policeman screamed as police officers surrounded the house. Elaine Brown was inside and peered out the window to a sight of what looked like over a hundred police officers surrounding the building, exiting a fumigation tarp attached to a home across the street she had not noticed earlier that day. The threat to bring them outside she could see involved Geronimo Pratt and Nathaniel Clark, who both were laying face down on the driveway with shotguns pressed into their cheeks. She could hear the sound of boots stomping in the garage and above her on the roof as well.

“Come out now, or we’ll blow their heads off!” the policeman repeated.

Four women were inside the house, as well as a three-week-old baby wearing a diaper and a pajama jumper. The women took the baby out of the crib and she was wrapped in a coat. They moved away from the front of the house into the main bedroom and laid down.

They could hear Pratt outside on the pavement shouting at the policemen: “There ain’t nothing but women in there, man!” The women lay listening as they could hear police loading shells into 12-gauge shotguns.

This is it, Brown thought. We’re going to die today. She held hands with the other women as they looked at one another on the floor; the footsteps came pounding up the stairs.

The next day, on January 18, 1969, the FBI created an index card for the 22-year-old Pratt in their files. He was a charismatic leader in their estimation and had to be neutralized; it would take the Bureau less than a year to find an efficacious and unexpected way to accomplish this.

Cheaters

“This is fucking bullshit, man. And you can tell that fucking queer Jack Hoover I said so, asshole.” With these coarse words, an FBI trainee quit the Bureau’s program meant to develop special agents. The instructor had been discussing the intricacies of how agents submitted travel requests. The trainee blew up after being subjected to the minutiae of rules and regulations coupled with power trips on the part of the FBI Academy teachers. Wesley Swearingen had his doubts about what he was witnessing as well, but he was in for the long haul. Encouraged by his mother, who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, to apply to the FBI, Swearingen had previously worked in the Navy and in an iron mine. He exercised in preparation for the training, expecting to need to be in peak physical shape. He was surprised at the state of his out-of-shape colleagues at the beginning of the program. He was more shocked to witness how the grading process worked: they were encouraged to cheat on their tests, marking each other exam’s, careful to always reach the 85% passing grade. One test appeared to be designed to dismiss whichever agents FBI instructors wanted to, including those that they suspected of being homosexual. Swearingen was certain he had failed the test: it was only 3 questions, required 85% to pass, and he had missed a question; he passed it anyway.

Swearingen was fortunate to possess the physical attributes the Bureau was looking for in its candidates; others were not so lucky. After meeting with the trainees, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover turned to Hugh Clegg, known colloquially to agents as “Troutmouth,” and told him that the graduating class possessed both a truck driver and a pinhead. Troutmouth understood that meant the two trainees had to be fired. Swearingen’s hat size was safe at 7 1⁄4 inches, but he had technically been part of a truck driver’s union as part of a previous job. One pinhead changed the label on his hat to 7 ½ inches and there was another trainee who Swearingen believed looked like a truck driver; both managed to escape being axed. Another two trainees were deemed to fit the bill through sheer guesswork, as Hoover was never specific when issuing his edicts related to appearance.

Chicago

Early in his tenure at the FBI, Swearingen assisted in a civil rights case that put two sheriff’s deputies from Mississippi in prison on federal charges; he was proud to be an FBI agent. This feeling began to change when he was moved to the Chicago field office. He pictured himself acting like Prohibition agent Eliot Ness in his memoir The Untouchables, pursuing gangsters in a dramatic way: “I imagined car chases and gun battles, with mobsters in broad-brim hats driving black bulletproof limousines with balloon whitewall tires.” He was informed by a veteran agent that Hoover refused to acknowledge the existence of the mob in Chicago: Meyer Lansky, a central organized crime figure in establishing the American Mafia, had blackmail material that Hoover and his associate director Clyde Tolson were closeted homosexuals. As a result, Hoover would never investigate the mob, Swearingen was told. Wes believed this to be a joke and responded saying that the agent should be careful with who he told such tales. In response, the agent “insisted he was not joking. He made me promise never to tell anyone as long as he lived,” Swearingen recalled. Wes remembered that there had been no training on the Mafia at Quantico. He had also heard rumors regarding the personal relationship between Hoover and Tolson, but he had dismissed them out of hand as jokes told “in bad taste.”

Rather than facing down the mob, Swearingen was assigned to the Communist Party undercover surveillance squad. Hoover, his idol, must have had an important plan in mind, he thought, to assign agents to this work. One of his first tasks was to follow two women, Doris Fine and Lillian Green, the wives of two Communist Party leaders. The two women reveled in the attention and by the time Swearingen arrived on the job, they were aware of the FBI surveillance. To have fun with the agents, the two waited for a train to approach at a railway crossing and then sped across the tracks quickly to evade the tailing, only for the special agents to find them later at a grocery store. The FBI agents kept a close eye on the women’s tanned bodies as they sunbathed in the park, one of their favorite pastimes. While Swearingen enjoyed this part of the job, he felt this act made him “a paid voyeur” and he could not see the connection between watching two women in bathing suits and the capture of a communist fugitive being sought by the FBI.

Swearingen felt a special thrill the first time he entered Lillian Green’s apartment with another agent to replace a surveillance device. He was taught the notion of “black bag jobs,” the FBI’s term for illegally breaking and entering into residences, either to photograph documents or install bugging equipment. He learned from a FBI sound technician that the term stemmed from “the black leather doctor’s bag in which agents carried burglary tools during the years of World War II, when Hoover first had authorized break-ins against American citizens.” Swearingen mistakenly thought these actions were approved by the Attorney General; only later from an assistant director did he discover that black bag jobs were actually in violation of the Constitution and burglary laws, consequently opening agents up to the possibility of prosecution. While he was engaging in criminal acts by breaking into homes in Chicago, he reflected on how he would have killed the enemy during his time in the U.S. Navy. “The irony is,” Swearingen wrote, “that acts considered criminal at home are admired and decorated for in war.”

In his role surveilling communists, Swearingen learned about the existence of the Security Index, a list maintained by the FBI of all known subversives in the country who the Bureau would then look to round up and detain in the event of a national emergency. He recalled placing labor leader Mollie Lieber West in the Index using the designation “DETCOM,” which was short for “detain as a communist.” Those to be arrested first were labeled COMSAB, who were capable of committing sabotage since they worked in companies with government contracts. He began to realize that agents were padding the lists with any associates they could find of the main communist targets to appear that they were being productive, resulting in the list becoming unmanageable and unenforceable. In Chicago during the 1950s, Swearingen estimated upwards of 50,000 names total in the Security and Communist Indexes and that “if there had been a national emergency it would have been necessary to set up tents in Soldier Field on Lake Shore Drive to house all those to be arrested.” He nonetheless believed in the mission: “If Hoover had ordered me to, I would have gladly assassinated these no good commie bastards.”

While Swearingen could find some legal justification for some of the work on communists through the Smith Act (partly ruled unconstitutional in 1957), he could find no such justification once he discovered that the FBI was pursuing with equal fervor a Black religious organization. “I knew then that the FBI was out of control,” he remarked. He had no idea how much further the Bureau would go.

Criminal

Swearingen soon got his wish to transfer to the criminal squad to work on more substantive cases. Since his previous work in black bag jobs was illegal, he had not been given the opportunity to testify in court but now he would get his chance. With another agent, he surveilled a New Yorker in Chicago selling pornography. When the man crossed state lines, the Bureau had a federal case against him and the two agents placed him under arrest. Swearingen helped to count the number of rolls of film in the man’s possession, but when later examining the inventory, he noticed two rolls were missing. His partner told him another FBI agent, the third highest ranking member of the Chicago office, had added the movies to his personal collection. Swearingen was greatly upset that he now had to lie to a grand jury about the theft of government evidence. The agent who stole the films later retired from the FBI in 1970 after 29 years with the Bureau and was named “Parent of the Year” by a local parent-teacher association.

Once while working on a communist surveillance case, Swearingen and his partner were asked to look for a stolen truck containing liquor that was potentially in their area. They found the semi-trailer truck parked in a dark alley and phoned in the discovery. The Bureau’s hijacking squad arrived and loaded up their cars with the stolen liquor for their personal use before cataloguing the remainder as evidence and reporting the recovery to the insurance company. The secret arrest lists, illegal black bag jobs, and blatant thievery before his eyes made Swearingen want to leave Chicago for good.

Having passed the FBI’s Spanish language test, Swearingen was hoping to attend a Spanish language school in California to eventually obtain a transfer. In the interim, he was offered Chicago cases related to the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. Through examining these cases, he learned of the FBI’s informant program and how for the Puerto Rican caseload, the lead agent had only developed one informant and invented two others to stay within his quota. Swearingen, believing he had no choice, continued the practice and wrote falsified reports for three informants based on the information provided from only one source. He shut down one fake informant’s file, citing bogus health reasons. Now that the number of informants was below the quota, infiltrators were sent into the Nationalist Party to develop additional informants. Of the two new sources Swearingen was sent, he realized one was fake and he again closed this new file.

Corruption was everywhere he looked, so Swearingen was no longer surprised when he learned that the FBI had violated kidnapping laws. Two agents informed Wes that a Soviet military intelligence major with an espionage mission had been picked up in Chicago and transported to a remote cabin for two weeks in Wisconsin. The agents interrogated the Soviet agent for eight hours a day, seven days a week, but the Soviet would only repeat his name, rank, and number. After two weeks, the man acted as if he had undergone a lobotomy. A psychiatrist the FBI brought in claimed: “This man is so well trained that if you continue questioning him he will lose his mind completely. This man is worthless to you in his present state. I doubt whether he will ever be normal even if he makes it back to the Soviet Union.”

Masters of Deceit

If the conduct of the Bureau writ large were not enough, the FBI Director’s personal standing diminished in Swearingen’s eyes with the publication of Hoover’s 1958 book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Hoover had not written a word of the book, as it had been a group effort with contributions from several agents; Wes himself wrote sections of the chapter How U.S. Communism Began, 1919-21. Nonetheless, Hoover pocketed the royalties and mandated all agents to purchase at least one copy of the book. One agent who refused to do so was transferred to a less interesting squad screening applicants to sensitive positions. In Swearingen’s view, the book was a compilation “full of propaganda and copyright infringements,” amounting to an “office joke.” An agent from Texas who grew up on a horse farm said he “hadn’t seen horse shit piled so high since he left his daddy’s ranch.” When he had his copy in hand, Swearingen looked at it and remarked to a coworker: “Hoover is the real master of deceit.” The fellow agent replied to Swearingen: “Are you a pinko? I don’t want to sit next to you.” The seemingly upset coworker let his deadpan expression sit for a few seconds until he could not take it any longer and burst into laughter.

“It’s a cold world out there, Wes,” Al Mehegan, the longest-serving agent in the Bureau, cautioned. Swearingen left the FBI in 1960 after his supervisor subverted his attempt to move back to the criminal division of the FBI. The world outside turned out to be more boring than cold for Swearingen while he worked on tax returns with his brother, an accountant by trade. After a year, he was back at the FBI but infused with a new lackadaisical attitude: he intentionally “stopped taking the FBI’s rules and regulations so seriously.” Before he had left, a stenographer told him that she had no choice but to sleep with her supervisor, a married man with five kids, lest she be transferred to Hawaii. Swearingen suggested she take the latter path. He was also already familiar with the FBI tactic of time theft: pretending to work from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. to keep one’s overtime higher than the average, which was mandatory. One agent refused to cook his timesheets and was threatened with reprisal. Following his return to the Bureau, Wes felt more comfortable openly joking about the state of affairs in front of management. When his supervisor complained that their squad had the lowest monthly average of overtime, Swearingen quipped: “That just proves you have the most honest squad in the office.” The team, with the exception of the supervisor, erupted into laughter.

Swearingen was assigned a new partner and his solution for solving the overtime conundrum was to “contact his informant,” a euphemism for going to a bar and drinking whisky. He and his partner both helped the team’s overtime average with this practice. With an office inspection on the way, Swearingen was tasked with creating phony informants to make the office appear to be more productive than the reality. He created fake informant files with the names of anyone he could think of, including bartenders, janitors, and delivery men, and closed the files once the office inspection was completed. “This was standard practice for most agents,” he claimed. The corruption was integrated into his day-to-day so that when a ten-year veteran of the FBI, William Turner, came forward demanding a congressional investigation into the Bureau, Swearingen chose job security over backing a colleague he knew was right. “I was ashamed of what I had become,” he conceded.

When working actual overtime on black bag jobs, the hours could be grueling: the break-ins could occur at any time between 3 a.m. and 11 p.m. He had become a non-existent entity in his wife’s life and she asked for a divorce in 1960. When he inquired if she was still interested in one a year later, she replied: “Sure. When can you move out?” Swearingen remarried and was transferred to work in Louisville, Kentucky in 1963. He later discovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that a bureau inspector had recommended he “be transferred to an office where security-type work is not as prominent a part of the office responsibilities as is the case in the Chicago area” and that he not be congratulated on his marriage.

Wes began to realize what had happened to his standing in the Bureau during the Louisville office Christmas party in 1963. Field supervisor Robert Peters danced with Swearingen’s new wife Paula on the dance floor and she returned to their table in tears. Her left-wing politics were ruining Swearingen’s career and she should get a divorce, she was told. Swearingen was furious that his supposedly confidential personnel file was apparently the talk of the Louisville office.

Ironically, through his work in the small town of Paintsville, Kentucky, Swearingen was able to gain the type of criminal investigation experience that he felt he had solely lacked in Chicago. He arrested two fugitives on his own but did not receive commendations, given that he violated an FBI rule requiring that another agent accompany him on such arrests. He also located a prison escapee with the assistance of a local sheriff. He eventually received four letters of commendation that year on other work for “outstanding devotion to duty.” Similar to what assistant director William C. Sullivan later revealed, Swearingen discovered that FBI statistics were often fraudulent in that “the local police did the work, and the FBI took the credit.” Swearingen claimed he closed “almost 50% more cases than the office average for the State of Kentucky” and the Bureau began to take notice, making him a bureau speaker for public appearances in 1966. He still could find pockets of admirable behavior in the domain of policing: his time there led him to believe that the Kentucky State Police “were the best law enforcement agency I ever had the honor and privilege of working with.”

Weathermen

In October 1969, the FBI sent agent provocateurs into a riot to encourage the domestic terrorist group the Weathermen in Chicago to commit violent acts, succeeding in securing the arrest of 287 members of the group by the Chicago police. In the early 1970s, renaming themselves the Weather Underground, the group planted a series of bombs in government buildings and banks in response to U.S. bombings in Southeast Asia. Assigned to the Weatherman task force in California, Swearingen was frustrated by witnessing his fellow agents waste time instead of looking for Weatherman fugitives: “the younger agents often played volleyball on the Venice beach with airline stewardesses, cruised the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, or otherwise entertained themselves.” As a consequence, not a single fugitive from the terrorist group was captured in six years. In addition, the Department of Justice had to drop its case against group leader Bernardine Dohrn in 1973 because “information culled from illegal wiretaps and illegal bag jobs could not be used in a court of law.”

Swearingen was especially bothered by the Bureau’s treatment of the Tucson Five, a group of housemates in Los Angeles who were alleged to know the whereabouts of a Weather Underground member. Despite a lack of evidence, the group was jailed for 18 months through grand jury proceedings and contempt of court charges, without ever facing trial. When they were finally released from prison in March 1971, they were immediately presented with subpoenas to appear before another grand jury two weeks later. Swearingen was furious, shouting at his superior Bill Nolan: “I’m not going to be a part of this bullshit charade of justice for a second time!” Nolan smiled and replied he would send another agent who needed “a vacation in Tucson.” The group’s attorney-client privilege rights were ultimately found to have been breached by the FBI through illegal wiretaps and black bag jobs, some of which Swearingen participated in.

With all he had seen, Swearingen wondered “just how far Hoover and his agents would go to protect what I began to see as their image of what was good for the country.” He would soon find out that this extended into murder.