Serving Power

The FBI, Crimes of Authority, and the Art of Lying

JOHN DEAN: Let’s say…that Hoover was above reproach, which is just not accurate, total bullshit. The person who would destroy Hoover’s image is going to be this man Bill Sullivan. Also it is going to tarnish quite severely…

RICHARD NIXON: Some of the FBI.

DEAN: …some of the FBI. And a former President. He is going to lay it out, and just all hell is going to break loose once he does it.

-White House tapes, March 13, 1973

In the early Cold War years, the FBI had reason to believe that a Yugoslavian Embassy employee in Washington, DC was having an affair with a colleague’s wife and wanted to catch him in the act, hoping to turn him into a double agent. Surveilling the adulterous couple, FBI agents watched as the pair drove to a motel along a highway outside of the city. The Bureau installed a photographic unit in an adjoining room, along with a two-way mirror. It did not take long before the FBI got the evidence they were looking for.

During an Embassy party some time later, an FBI agent carrying a stack of photographs in a briefcase struck up a conversation with the Yugoslav diplomat, pretending they had previously spoke at an earlier get together. The diplomat acted as if he remembered the agent and agreed to drive him home. “It’s only a few blocks,” the FBI agent assured him. The diplomat became frustrated when “a few blocks” turned into a winding series of turns. “Take a right here,” he was instructed, “then turn left, now down a block, now right again.” This continued until they reached a dead-end road with nowhere left to turn. “Where to now?” the diplomat asked, exasperated. “I can’t drive you all over Washington.”

The FBI agent was unperturbed. “I’ll get out here,” he answered, “but I have something to show you before I do.” He reached into his briefcase, pulling out a choice photograph of the diplomat in the midst of his secret liaison with his colleague’s wife at the motel. The diplomat stared at the photograph in silence for a long period of time. His facial expression kept changing as he tried to think of what to say next. He finally decided on: “Good photography,” and handed back the picture. The FBI agent was not done: “Here’s another one, just as good,” he said, “and another.” He kept handing the diplomat more photographs, twelve in total. Fed up, the diplomat slammed them against the dashboard of the car.

“Goddamn you,” the diplomat yelled, “you’re an FBI agent, and now you think you’ve got me. Well, I’m not going to work for you. Get out of the car!” In response to his refusal, the FBI mailed the photographs to the Yugoslav ambassador and the diplomat was returned home, his career ruined. “It’s a rough business,” William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director for domestic intelligence, conceded.

The FBI thought they would have better luck with a suspected Soviet spy in the early 1960s, whose cover was working as a beautician in New York City. Sullivan sought FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s permission to go beyond their traditional methods and ordered FBI agents to kidnap the woman out of her apartment. She was brought to an FBI “safehouse,” a location in a nearby suburb they rented anonymously without any ties to the Bureau. She was an American citizen, she claimed, and would be filing a complaint with the local police once they let her go, but the FBI refused to do so. The kidnapping lasted for days with round-the-clock interrogation and supervision, including the services of a nurse. The Bureau brought out all of the evidence they had on her, eventually wearing her down into admitting that she was in fact a lieutenant colonel with the Soviet military intelligence service, commonly known as GRU. Finally agreeing to become a double agent for the FBI, she was released to her Brooklyn apartment.

Daily contact was maintained with the new double agent, but one day the FBI was unable to reach her by phone. Knocking on her apartment door was also met with silence. The Bureau discovered she had ceased showing up to work. “There’s only one thing to do,” Sullivan told the agents, “break into her apartment.” Sullivan was surprised that receiving Hoover’s approval only took one attempt. Once the FBI agents entered the apartment, they discovered that the woman was dead. They found her body next to a note explaining that as a high-ranking woman in Soviet intelligence, she was unable to bring herself to work as a double agent and that if she ever returned home to Russia, she would again break under pressure and reveal how she had been compromised by the Bureau. Believing the situation to be unresolvable, she wrote: “There’s only one way out, and I’m taking it.” Her handwriting deteriorated as she wrote, a line extending from a word as her letter was left unfinished, the pen on the floor, revealing that she had died mid-sentence.

The FBI agents removed all of her belongings that proved her connection to Soviet espionage, including code books, a fake passport, and a significant amount of cash. One agent took on the job of pretending to be a concerned neighbor and placed a call to the police, who found the remains of a mysterious woman. Her unclaimed body was buried on Hart Island, a nearby site in the Northeastern Bronx intended for the homeless, indigent, and mass victims of disease.

Winstead

William C. Sullivan was not a disgruntled employee at the FBI who never received the promotions he felt he deserved. To the contrary, he had difficulty understanding how he reached the pinnacle of Bureau management, the coveted number three position situated directly under the “uni-party” of Hoover and his protégé, Clyde Tolson. During his career, Sullivan displayed a profound ability to navigate office politics. However, once he reached the upper echelons of management, to say he was unimpressed with what he saw would be a gross understatement.

Joining the FBI in 1941, Sullivan learned early on that to lie was essential in remaining employed at the Bureau. Questioning the organization’s policies “was a sure road to early retirement.” As part of his three-month introductory training, he was told the FBI motto was “We Never Close a Case,” which he found to be substantially inferior to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s slogan, “We Always Get Our Man”; however, he was disinclined to mention this feeling to his hard-working instructors. Sullivan enjoyed his firearms training most of all, listening to tales of FBI exploits, including how agent Charles Winstead had shot and killed the gangster John Dillinger in 1934. He also gained an early understanding of how appearances were paramount in the Bureau when he was given advice on how to conduct himself in a field office: “Bill, don’t worry about your investigations. Be damn sure you wash your car every day you come to work though, or you’ll be in real trouble.” Hoover, it turned out, “had a fetish for clean shiny cars.” Sullivan wrote to his wife about his doubts concerning the FBI training; she counseled that he should get out while he still could. The training did not cover tapping phones or opening mail; this he ended up being taught from more experienced agents. They believed this was “official government policy, necessary to national security,” not for a second considering that they would one day be accused of “violating the law and performing criminal acts.”

Assigned to New Mexico, he was saddled with the role of bieng the sole agent to accompany the experienced but difficult Charles Winstead of Dillinger fame. Sullivan first laid his eyes on Winstead, a thin man wearing a large sombrero, tapping away on a typewriter using two fingers faster than Sullivan could type with ten. Winstead was immediately disappointed with the young man the Bureau had sent him: “Goddamn it,” he yelled, “am I to be saddled with another Sullivan? A year ago they sent me an Irishman from the East. He had a fist fight with every man he arrested, and when there was no one to arrest, he started hitting policemen. He didn’t last long.” Mistaking Sullivan for a city boy, Winstead only gained a modicum of respect for him once he discovered that Sullivan had in fact grown up on a farm in New England. “I walked six miles to get to school every day. There was no public transportation to or in Bolton. We had no telephone, no mail service, and no electricity. I worked around cattle and horses all my life, and I think I made a big mistake leaving the farm,” he told Winstead with regret.

Winstead regaled Sullivan with the story of how his bullets were the ones that killed Dillinger, two other FBI agents shooting alongside him, with Winstead’s final shot striking the gangster’s head. He spelled out how Hoover was to be treated if one was to survive in the Bureau: “If Hoover ever calls you in, dress like a dandy, carry a notebook, and write in it furiously whenever Hoover opens his mouth. You can throw the notes away afterward if you like. And flatter him, everyone at headquarters knows Hoover is an egomaniac, and they all flatter him constantly. If you don’t, you’ll be noticed.” A 15-year veteran of the FBI by this point, Winstead was immensely cynical of how investigations ran their course. “When I investigate a man and prove he’s a criminal,” he explained to Sullivan, “if he doesn’t already work for the government, they’ll hire him. If he already has a government job, once they hear he’s a crook they’ll promote him. The criminals in Congress only feel comfortable with other criminals.”

Dynasty

“Goddamn the Kennedys!” Clyde Tolson was going on a rant as Sullivan sat listening nearby. “First there was Jack,” he continued, “now there’s Bobby, and then Teddy. We’ll have them on our necks until the year 2000.” Hoover nodded along in agreement. Ironically, the family’s patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a friend of Hoover, who failed to catch on that Hoover “was quite a con man too,” in Sullivan’s words.

In the early 1940s, the FBI listened with excitement as a young John F. Kennedy was overheard on a microphone they had planted in the apartment of a suspected Nazi spy, “a beautiful young Scandinavian woman.” They had also tapped her phone and the tapes containing Kennedy’s voice were forwarded to FBI headquarters, where “Hoover could hardly contain his delight.” Hoover passed this information on to the White House and he suggested that JFK be transferred “for security reasons.” The reaction was swift: JFK was removed from his social life of pursuing women and placed on a patrol torpedo boat in the Pacific theater of World War II. This led to Kennedy’s reputation as a war hero and a Congressional career that ultimately resulted in his election as President of the United States in 1960. Sullivan believed that Hoover had unwittingly played a crucial role in this trajectory: “The PT boat helped make Kennedy president.”

Sullivan also believed that his promotion to an assistant director position in the Bureau was due to the Kennedys assuming power. To satisfy his new boss, Hoover wanted to be able to point out that his team included “an Irish Democrat from Massachusetts” even if the Kennedy clan had no idea who Sullivan was. “I was the best Hoover could come up with,” Sullivan estimated. In addition to their intense surveillance of Martin Luther King, the FBI continued to collect derogatory information on JFK, with the intention of waiting for the moment when Hoover “could unload it all and destroy them both.” The most sensitive files were kept in Hoover’s personal files, “which filled four rooms on the fifth floor of headquarters.”

After JFK’s assassination, Hoover was furious that the FBI had failed to adequately surveil Lee Harvey Oswald. He demoted two Bureau supervisors, adding letters of censure to their file. He also censured 15 other agents, including Sullivan, who according to his account “had never even seen the file on Oswald.” Sullivan viewed this move as Hoover attempting to “cover himself.” When Robert F. Kennedy announced his run for the presidency in 1968, Sullivan again listened as Tolson declared: “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”

Bureaucratic Insanity

“Do you know who I am? I am the commander in chief of the United States!” Lyndon Johnson did not appreciate being told no, even if it was too late in the evening for the FBI to check with a telephone company on what phone calls his CBS critics were making. Even though usually “nothing ever came of this waste of FBI manpower,” the requests kept coming, no matter their lack of probity or legality. The FBI was also asked to check the names of those sending negative telegrams to the White House that were critical of the United States’ Vietnam policy. The Johnson administration wanted “a picture of just who was sending these communications and whether a pattern existed.”

The requests from LBJ were never turned down by Hoover, no matter how ludicrous they were, as Sullivan was soon to discover. After President Johnson forced Hoover to investigate the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964, Hoover called Sullivan to check on the progress being made in finding their missing bodies. “We’re doing everything we can,” Sullivan explained, “but we’re not making any real progress.”

“President Johnson will be very unhappy about that,” Hoover complained. “How many men have we got down there?” Sullivan explained that there were 200 sailors on site from the U.S. Navy, assisting the FBI in searching for the bodies after the missing boys’ car was found burned in a swamp. “Keep the pressure on and do everything possible,” Hoover urged and hung up the phone. Sullivan began his regular workday and at noon glanced at the headlines from the news ticker on his desk. There was a story on how Johnson had ordered 200 marines to help with the search for the missing bodies. Where the hell did he get the two hundred marines? Sullivan thought.

Within seconds, Hoover was calling on the phone: “I thought you told me it was two hundred sailors.” Sullivan confirmed that the personnel involved were sailors, not marines. “Do we have any marines down there?” Hoover asked. “None,” Sullivan replied.

“I told President Johnson it was two hundred sailors,” Hoover disclosed. “Why did it come out marines? I’ve got to call the president and tell him a mistake has been made.” Hoover hung up and called Sullivan again ten minutes later. Hoover was clearly bothered by his exchange with LBJ as his voice was shaking: “I told President Johnson that we had two hundred sailors in Mississippi, not two hundred marines. He told me if that was the case, to get two hundred marines down there right away.” The White House’s mistake was now their problem to fix. Hoover then delegated responsibility to Sullivan to make the unneeded request to the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

McNamara was mystified and asked Sullivan to repeat the backstory twice. “I don’t understand this,” McNamara confessed. “I’ve never received such a request from the FBI. I have a direct line to the president. I talk to him every day. Why didn’t he ask me? Sullivan, where did you get these instructions?” Sullivan explained with patience: “I told you, I got these orders from Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover got them from President Johnson.”

McNamara was irritated that the usual chain of command was being bypassed. He asked again if Sullivan could be confused; Sullivan replied that he had taken careful notes and was certain of the request’s details. “Well, it doesn’t make any sense,” McNamara concluded, “but if they want two hundred marines down there, I’ll have Joe Califano handle it. I’ll have him call you.”

“What the hell is going on over there?” Califano, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was much more blunt in his approach and he began cursing up a storm. “Now look, Joe,” Sullivan pleaded, “please don’t argue with me. If you want to get this thing straightened out, call the president.” No one was willing to challenge LBJ on what was clearly a simple mistake. “Hell no,” Califano countered. “This is what happens when the brass starts to do something they should leave to the working stiffs. They just don’t know how things work.” Califano eventually relented: “I’ll get 200 marines down there, but goddamn it, I won’t get 201.”

Sullivan agreed that 200 marines were sufficient and Califano called with an update 30 minutes later, describing how a helicopter carrying dozens of marines was on its way to Mississippi, a second was preparing for take-off, and several more were to follow. The second helicopter was in the air when Hoover called with an urgent update: “Stop them, stop them right away. President Johnson does not want any marines to land in Mississippi.” In the hours since the announcement and mix-up, LBJ had heard from local politicians such as Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson who were threatening to go to the press with claims that the marines were invading the state against the will of its people.

The order now being reversed at the last minute, Sullivan called Califano, who resumed cursing, with severely foul language that Sullivan had “never heard” before in his life. Sullivan interrupted him: “Joe, stop swearing and head off those helicopters!” Califano intervened just in time before the first helicopter touched the ground in Mississippi. Sullivan counseled Califano in a follow-up phone call on how to handle similar situations in the future: “When you get an unusual request, just try to see the humor in it—lean back in your chair and laugh like hell.” Califano was silent in response for a long time, before replying earnestly, “Well, goddamn it, I might see the humor in it tomorrow, but I’m not laughing today.”

Regardless of the involvement of sailors or marines, their presence in the end did not influence the outcome of the case. The investigation gained momentum once the FBI decided to bribe a Klansman informant to the tune of $30,000 ($300,000 today) and he gave up the location of the bodies, which were buried under 30 feet of dirt on a cattle farm. He had been one of the 19 men who had taken the civil rights workers out of their car and shot them near a secluded road. Using some of the money, the informant then built “a barricade around his house” and bought “a couple of ugly German shepherds” for protection. The participants had been warned by accomplice Cecil Price, a local police officer and KKK member, in the immediate aftermath of the crimes that: “The first man who talks is dead!” Sullivan estimated the action “probably saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of investigating hours.” The story of the bribe used to crack the Mississippi Burning case is still not acknowledged by the FBI or widely reported to this day.

The Importance of Appearance

“One of them is a pinhead. Get rid of him!” Hoover had just finished shaking hands with graduates from the FBI’s training program, in which each of them were required to have dry palms: as they stood in line, each trainee held a handkerchief in their fist until the moment they greeted Hoover. The FBI counselor tasked with locating and firing the new pinheaded special agent initially had difficulty finding a trainee that fit that description. Eventually, he thought of a more exhaustive method: since all agents at the time were required to wear hats, he sifted through them all while the agents were on the firing range at Quantico, Virginia, until he found three in the men’s locker room that were the smallest size, 6 7/8 inches. Rather than risk making a mistake in dismissing the wrong pinhead, all three of trainees with small heads were fired. Another agent recalled a similar story for another graduating class in which Hoover instructed his staff: “Those two or three men that look like truck drivers—get rid of them.” Again, administrators were at a loss finding those that fit the bill and “simply dumped the fifteen who looked the most like truck drivers, just to be sure.”

As Sullivan quickly learned during his early years at the Bureau, appearances and first impressions were predominant before substance could be considered. Sullivan himself had personal knowledge of a young clerk who had the misfortune of riding an elevator with Hoover, wearing a red vest and with pimples covering his face. Once Hoover returned to his office, the order went out for the clerk to be fired and the man who recommended his employment at the FBI to be demoted.

Under Hoover’s strict standards of appearance, bald men were not permitted to become agents. “Hoover thought that a bald head made a bad impression,” Sullivan wrote. “No matter if the man involved was a member of Phi Beta Kappa or a much-decorated marine, or both. Appearances were terribly important to Hoover, and special agents had to have the right look and wear the right clothes.” After an agent was hired who later became bald, he was allowed to keep his job but had to remain out of the limelight.

Sullivan felt for the plight of one special agent named Nathan Ferris, who was related to the inventor of the Ferris Wheel. Ferris began his career at the Bureau with a full head of hair, but he was now bald, overseeing all of the FBI foreign offices from headquarters and reporting to Sullivan. In the early 1960s, Ferris expressed the desire to close out his career in Mexico City, where he had worked previously. He and wife wanted to return so badly, he was willing to accept a demotion to make it happen. Sullivan saw just one problem: the job would entail being out in the public sphere most of the time. “Nate,” Sullivan carefully explained, “you know what the policy is on bald heads. How am I going to get you a job in Mexico?”

Sullivan decided to submit Ferris’ name for a transfer regardless. The number three man in the FBI at the time, Al Belmont, called Sullivan immediately upon receipt of the memo. “Why the hell did you send this memorandum on Ferris?” Belmont asked. “He’s bald; Hoover will never approve him.” He too eventually relented and agreed to push the memo through in the faint hope that Ferris’ follicly challenged head would somehow escape the notice of his superior.

A few days later, Belmont phoned Sullivan with an update. “I finally put something over on that no-good bastard Tolson,” he laughed. Belmont relayed the conversation that occurred when Tolson approached him in person over the memo:

“Belmont, I seem to remember that Nate Ferris is bald,” Tolson declared.

“Oh no, Mr. Tolson. You’re thinking of another fellow,” Belmont explained, naming another agent who was even more bald than Ferris.

Tolson gave Belmont a stern look and then his face lit up. “You’re right!” Tolson exclaimed. “That is who I’m thinking of.”

The final hurdle was Hoover, who happened to be preparing for his appearance before the House Appropriations Committee, which helped to set the FBI’s budget. While an in-person interview by Hoover of candidates transferring to foreign offices was customary, Sullivan and Ferris composed a flattering letter to the Director explaining that Ferris knew how busy he was and that he was willing to forgo the interview. To their amazement, Hoover approved such a transfer for the first time without seeing the candidate.

The deception operation required a new tactic two years later when it came time for Ferris’ return to headquarters for his performance review. Sullivan saw when Ferris arrived that he was in fact still bald but also carrying gifts of silver from Mexico. Meeting both Tolson and Hoover separately, he spread an array of expensive silver trinkets across their desks and they neglected to focus on his scalp. Sullivan was pleased to report: “Nate returned to Mexico a happy man.”

Press Prostitutes

Despite making mistakes, sometimes the Bureau got lucky. During World War II, the FBI New York office received a phone call from an individual who wanted to turn himself and his colleagues in. He claimed to be part of a Nazi group with the mission of sabotaging defense production facilities inside the United States and that they had landed on a beach in Long Island. The FBI agent on the other end of the line thought this was a joke and laughed: “Yesterday, Napoleon called,” and he slammed the phone in disbelief. The German called back the next day and reached a different agent who took the proper steps. “FBI NABS SABOTEURS LANDED BY U-BOATS” was the resulting news headline on June 24, 1942. The FBI’s proficient investigative work was praised in the press as the Bureau desperately tried to cover up its shortcomings. It was later revealed in the trial through agent Norvel D. Willis that the FBI had offered the German turncoat a presidential pardon if he pleaded guilty and did not testify as to how he had originally informed the FBI of the plot.

Sullivan feared that the main purpose of the FBI had shifted over time from investigations to glorifying Hoover. All senior members of the FBI team were to blame, he believed, in addition to Hoover himself at the helm. No one was willing to confront the man who could end their career at any moment. “All the well-meaning people in the Bureau did exactly what he told them,” Sullivan explained, “for if they didn’t, they’d be pounding the pavements.”

Part of the Hoover mystique was built up through his collection of honorary degrees from colleges and universities, though he grew tired of this practice after 15 years. An FBI specialty in building the myth was manipulation of the press: special agents would feed the media stories and all they had to do was write them as they were told. “Some of them lived off us,” Sullivan admitted. “It was an easy way to make a living. They were our press prostitutes.” A large number of FBI resources were committed to the propaganda operation, which also involved responding to unsolicited letters from the public, reading newspapers across the country and writing letters to thank editors for the positive news stories they ran on the FBI. Public relations were handled by the intentionally mislabeled Crime Records division of the Bureau. Sullivan summarized the outcome of the operation as: “Untold millions of the taxpayers’ money squandered.” In addition, Hoover offered FBI services to business executives from major companies, such as Warner Brothers, to meet foreign dignitaries and “bragged that he had the motion picture studio under his thumb.”

On one occasion, the Crime Records division worked on a letter in response to a minister who was disturbed that Hoover spent so much time at the racetrack betting on horses. The agent writing on Hoover’s behalf explained that he did in fact go to the racetrack: “I’ve loved horses since I was a boy,” the agent wrote in Hoover’s voice, “and I love to watch them run.” He described how he would place bets at the $2 window to not embarrass his companions but that his true interest lay in the horses. The minister never replied to this letter, which amounted to fiction in any case. Hoover would make $2 bets for show, while another agent would be placing his real bet at the $100 window. “When he won,” Sullivan recalled, “he was a pleasure to work with for days.” The betting occurred during work hours, Hoover pretending that he and Tolson were working on a case, as they drove off from the Department of Justice in a bulletproof car. “It was common knowledge that they were actually rushing to make the first race,” Sullivan recalled.

In terms of acts of personal corruption from Hoover, Sullivan was perhaps most upset by the books supposedly authored by the Director, since he had personally worked to make them a reality. Sullivan suggested the book idea for Masters of Deceit, Hoover’s first book. He and four or five other agents did the research and writing for the book. Agents across the country were tasked with promoting the book to raise its sales, receiving bonuses themselves if they sold a large number, through methods such as planting reviews of the book written by the FBI in local newspapers. Sullivan recalled that a joke around the office went as follows: “Masters of Deceit, written by the Master of Deceit who never even read it.”

Sullivan gave a speech promoting the book at the Citizens’ Committee of Cincinnati, a front group created by the FBI with the sole purpose of advertising Masters of Deceit. All attendees received a free copy of the book, funded by Evan Rhodes, a millionaire described by Sullivan as “a well-meaning man who was being used by Hoover as the committee’s figurehead.” Sullivan proposed to Hoover that royalties for the book go to charity, a suggestion which was not well-received. Instead, the Director pocketed most of the book’s profits, upset nonetheless that the extra revenue pushed him into a higher tax bracket. Hoover learned his lesson for the next book that Sullivan proposed, A Study in Communism, which saw its profits funneled into an FBI Recreation Fund, a tax haven that Hoover could use at his leisure.

To gain its ever-increasing budget, in time Sullivan discovered how the Bureau achieved this feat: statistics would be inflated, including taking the credit for local police operations such as recovering stolen vehicles which would be attributed to the work of the FBI. Sullivan found the work of the fabled FBI lab to be “an illusion,” that the Bureau required the help of the CIA or NSA often to get their work done. Sullivan went along with all of the deceptions, getting promoted along the way. “The Bureau system made liars of us all,” he acknowledged. “If you didn’t lie you couldn’t survive.” Nevertheless, he believed that the FBI “should earn its respect from the citizens of the United States by the results of its work, not from the results of its propaganda.”

A story exemplifying the insanity of the Hoover propaganda operations involved Russell Asch, an agent who made the mistake of misremembering Hoover’s recipe for popovers. In response to a letter from the public, Asch recited the recipe from memory rather than looking it up. Hoover’s secretary caught the mistake and informed the Director. Asch was censured and as a result, his promotion was delayed. His wife Polly read in the Washington Post a series of articles describing how the FBI worked on espionage and bank robbery cases. She wanted to know: was he working on these types of investigations?

“Good god!” Asch exclaimed in a panic. “What could I tell Polly? Could I tell her I was sending out popover recipes?”

Fascination

Sullivan acknowledged that Martin Luther King’s “love life” had been captured on tape through FBI surveillance of King’s hotel rooms and that any such material had to be immediately sent to Hoover. He listened to all of the King tapes, which, for example, in one seventeen-month period beginning in January 1964 included 15 separate wiretaps “placed in as many hotels as King traveled throughout the country. From New York City to Milwaukee, Detroit, Washington, Sacramento, and Honolulu.” Sullivan recalled that the tapes were made available to some journalists in the media, Senator Robert Byrd, and LBJ. In addition, derogatory information on King was sent to the Pope in advance of King’s visit to Vatican City in September 1964.

“Hoover had always been fascinated by pornography, and if any that came to the Bureau during the course of an investigation was kept from him, he’d raise hell,” Sullivan remembered. Agents were instructed to use tape to bind the files for this type of sensitive material. However, scandalous photographs would inevitably be examined so many times by FBI employees, with the file being opened and shut so many times, that the tape would inevitably lose its adhesion. One such case involved a female political activist. Hoover was upset that he had not been sent her nude photos, yelling at Sullivan: “I want to see them immediately and I want to know why I hadn’t been sent those pictures before.”