Haftanın Kitabı 73: Enemies - A History Of The FBI
Künye: Tim Weiner, Enemies - A History Of The FBI, 2012.
Künye: Tim Weiner, Enemies - A History Of The FBI, 2012.
Özet: Release date: February 14, 2012 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • New York Daily News • Slate “Fast-paced, fair-minded, and fascinating, Tim Weiner’s Enemies turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today’s headlines.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath NATIONAL BESTSELLER Enemies is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history. Here is the hidden history of America’s hundred-year war on terror. The FBI has fought against terrorists, spies, anyone it deemed subversive—and sometimes American presidents. The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between protecting national security and infringing upon civil liberties. It is a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic.
Ne dediler?: “Outstanding.”—The New York Times
“Absorbing . . . a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals.”—Los Angeles Times
Söyleşi: Interesting People. Informative Conversations.
March 11, 2012 Tim Weiner Author, "Enemies: A History of the FBI"
Info: Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author Tim Weiner discusses his new historical narrative, “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” The book details the FBI’s 100 year hidden history of war against terrorists, spies, and ultimately any person or group deemed subversive. Weiner reveals details of secretly taped conversations FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Lawful and unlawful strategies against their enemies were reviewed. He writes about the agency’s predominantly illegal secret intelligence and surveillance techniques such as wire-tapping, break-ins, and burglaries. The author suggests that the FBI is in a constant tug of war between national security concerns and the protection of civil liberties. Weiner reveals how he researched recently declassified documents which included J. Edgar Hoover’s personal intelligence files. In addition, he talks about the major contribution to his research from scrutinizing over 200 oral histories of current and former FBI agents. Weiner discusses his early career as a reporter, sharing the story of The Kansas City Times’ coverage of the collapse of an atrium skywalk in a Kansas City Hyatt Hotel in 1981. The coverage won Weiner and his team a Pulitzer Prize. His second Pulitzer was received for investigative journalism on black budget spending while employed by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners. C-SPAN uses its best efforts to provide accurate transcripts of its programs, but it can not be held liable for mistakes such as omitted words, punctuation, spelling, mistakes that change meaning, etc.
BRIAN LAMB: Tim Wiener, in your new book, The History of the FBI, I want to read this paragraph. ”The Congressman demanded to see what else the bureau had on him. He became one of the first American’s granted the request to see his own FBI file. It included a letter that a suspicious nun had sent to Hoover four years before calling Father Drinan a Communist plant inside the Catholic Church.”
What were the circumstances?
TIM WEINER: Well this was a Congressman, Father Robert Drinan, from Massachusetts, very anti-war, pacifist, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat and he had been in the FBIs files for some years and in the – in the files, including those files were the – a letter from a suspicious nun thinking – saying that Father Drinan was, you know, a tool of the Communist party.
Well this was in the beginning of a long battle after J. Edgar Hoover died between Congress and the FBI over the powers that the FBI had exerted for decades under Hoover to gather political information, conduct wire tapping, plant bugs, hidden microphones in peoples’ homes and offices, break into their homes and offices and steal their personal effects and this was part of the great battle of the ’70s that resulted in the fall of Richard Nixon. The investigations into government misconduct by the CIA and the FBI. And eventually a passage of – of new laws had restricted the FBI.
LAMB: In that same chapter, you have the following quote. ”Reverend Drinan started shouting, ”They shoot to kill! They shoot to kill!” he recounted. I figured the guy had gone completely bonkers, Healey said.” Who is Healey and what were the circumstances?
WEINER: Healey’s and FBI agent and who had worked under Hoover for decades hunting Communists and he had the job of giving a Congressman a tour of the new FBI headquarters which is down the street here across from the Justice Department and the old FBI headquarters which was located in the Justice Department itself. And Reverend Drinan went to the firing – you know they have a marksman range down in the basement where FBI agents keep their shooting target skills up. And he asked what the bureau’s policy was on – on – on firearms. And Agent Healey told him, well you know, we – we – we try to settle things peaceably, you know. And then what, he said; and then we shoot to kill. And Father Drinan started going down the halls of the Justice Department yelling, ”They shoot to kill!” It was emblematic is why I have in – in – in Enemies: The History of the FBI.
This is emblematic of the kind of struggle that was taking place, just beginning to take place between the FBI as Hoover had left it after 48 years in power and the rest of the government of the United States. LAMB: What’s the story behind you taking 25 – 27 years I think it is on a Freedom of Information request?
WEINER: When literally a few weeks after my last book, Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA came out, I got a call from a lawyer here in Washington who had represented another reporter from the New York Times in a Freedom of Information Act suit that he, the reporter, had filed in 1981, 26, almost 27 years earlier. And it had just come to fruition after all this struggle and they lawyer said he’s not interested anymore, he’s moved on to other things. These are J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files. I’ve got four banker’s boxes of them. Do you want to see them? And I said, yes I do. And they’re part of the foundation of this book these are the files that Hoover kept on American intelligence from the end of World War II until his death 27 years late in 1972.
LAMB: We have a list of all the people that have run the FBI, both acting and ones that have been confirmed.
WEINER: It’s not many people.
LAMB: On the screen is Hoover; L. Patrick Gray; Clarence Kelley; James Adams, that was a short one; and William Webster was along one, nine years; John Otto William Sessions for seven years; Floyd Clarke, interim,; Lewis Freeh, seven and three-quarters years; Thomas Pickard, three months; and then Robert Mueller, 10 and a half years.
Who on that list would you put at the top of the list for being the most honest and who would be at the bottom?
WEINER: Well unquestionably, Bob Mueller, who has run the bureau for the last decade and will run it for another two years is at once the most successful, the most powerful and the most civil liberties minded, I would say, FBI Director in the history of the FBI which goes back 103 years.
Every day, Bob Mueller, who took office, God help him, on September 4, 2001, a week before this city and New York City were attacked. Everyday he has to calibrate a very difficult calculus. It’s like a tug-of-war. On the one hand, national security; on the other hand civil liberties. They’ve got to get this right.
In America, under the Constitution, we want security and liberty. We want to be both safe and free but these are opposing forces and they’ve got to be balanced.
LAMB: What’s the story about Bob Mueller in the Oval Office with the President, George W. Bush?
WEINER: Well, you’ll remember that in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush instituted a very, very secret program of electronic eavesdropping. The National Security Agency, which is responsible for the gathering of – of electronic intelligence by which I mean e-mails, telecommunications like cell phones, computer data, anything that can be transmitted by wire or by satellite through the ether of this country and around the world.
President Bush issued a very secret, very difficult and constitutionally very dangerous program to track and trap and trace e-mails and telephone calls from all over the world in the United States. Now if you send and e-mail from Karachi, Pakistan to Beijing, China, chances are that that e-mail is going to be routed through a server in the United States for a fraction of a second.
The United States government was trapping this material and trapping the e-mails and phone calls of Americans without judicial warrants from the secret court of federal judges that authorizes this. So this went on for more than two years. And by the start of 2004, Bob Mueller’s the head of the FBI, Jim Comey, the Acting Attorney General and John Ashcroft, the Attorney General – Ashcroft was ill in the hospital, you’ll remember when he found out about this program, it literally made him sick and he was rushed to Georgetown Hospital a few miles from here with acute pancreatitis. He could have died.
And that’s how secret it was. The Attorney General did not know the full scope of this program. There were probably 10 people in the government who did. So Bob Mueller, head of the FBI and the top two guys in the Justice Department, the Attorney General and his number two, determine that the program is illegal and Mueller writes out a resignation letter by hand, puts it in his pocket, walks into the Oval Office and said, Mr. President, this electronic eavesdropping program is illegal, unconstitutional and unless you skin it back and get it within the ambit of the law, I’m going to resign and so is the Attorney General and so is the Deputy Attorney General. Well visions of the Saturday Night Massacre under Nixon danced in President Bush’s head where two Attorney Generals went down, resigning in protest.
He was up for reelection. His government could have fallen as Nixon’s did under the impact of such a series of resignations. And Mueller won. And at that moment, the tug-of-war we were speaking of between national security and civil liberties began to become more even.
LAMB: How did you find that out?
WEINER: Just two years ago, the Inspector General of the Justice Department did a report in which he released Mueller’s hand-written notes of that meeting. Bush also describes it in his memoirs. And it’s clear, with all due respect to the former president, that he lied to the FBI. That is a felony.
LAMB: Here’s a footnote. Under the chapter Flaws in the Armor, Freeh’s book is a classic Washington memoir, though often dubius and disingenuous. I cite it only to reflect Freeh’s direct experience. Freeh distorts many aspects of his dealings with the White House. You also say in you book that Lewis Freeh refused to ever go to the Oval Office while he was the FBI Director in the Clinton Administration.
WEINER: Well, here was the problem. Lewis Freeh became the head of the FBI in September 1993, a few months into the Clinton Administration and he quickly determined that the president of the United States was not the Commander in Chief, but a target of a criminal investigation, which he was, a target of several criminal investigations run by the FBI.
Well this put Freeh, he thought, in a rather awkward position and during the eight years of Clinton’s presidency, these two men spoke face-to-face or on the phone five or six times.
Now this is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have silence like this between the FBI Director and the president or between the FBI and the CIA, which is also a serious problem. And this failure to communicate was one of the proximate causes of the success of the 9/11 attack.
The FBI under Lewis Freeh, with all respect to Lewis Freeh, great FBI agent, great federal prosecutor, fair minded federal judge, he had everything it took to be a great FBI Director except a sense of proportion, I would argue.
The FBI spent three more times money, people, manpower investigating specious allegations of Chinese campaign contributions and didn’t investigate terrorism in the 1990s.
LAMB: OK. I asked you earlier who would you put on top, you put Bob Mueller on ...
WEINER: Absolutely.
LAMB: ... that. Who would you put of all these FBI Directors on the bottom? And, by the way, add to that anybody you’re writing about, presidents or people that were around presidents, who would have been the most dishonest?
WEINER: Let’s start with the FBI.
LAMB: OK.
WEINER: God rest his soul, L. Patrick Gray, who died very recently was selected to succeed J. Edgar Hoover after Hoover died, nearly 40 years ago. And this selection was made by President Nixon who wanted to be blunt, a stooge as the head of the FBI. Gray had never run anything bigger than a submarine and suddenly he’s asked to replace J. Edgar Hoover? And Nixon is telling him, listen I’m going to ask you to do illegal things and you’re going to shut up about them and if asked, you’re going to lie about them. And Gray, poor man, saluted and said, yes sir. Here was the Commander in Chief telling him to lie, to keep secrets from Congress and to do whatever it took to uphold the presidency. Nixon was also running for reelection.
Gray was indicted for lying to Congress and other crimes and the Justice Department decided it wasn’t worth the candle. He was actually indicted first and foremost for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans along with his number two and three men at the FBI, Mark Felt, who we know better now as Deep Throat and Ed Miller. Gray and Miller were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans. They were pardoned by President Reagan early in his first term.
LAMB: While you’re on the Mark Felt story, I think you said, that was it Richard Kleindienst that told Patrick Gray to fire Felt five times and he wouldn’t do it?
WEINER: Richard Nixon wanted to fire J. Edgar Hoover and he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t have the courage, didn’t have the spine.
LAMB: Why not?
WEINER: Fire J. Edgar Hoover? I don’t think the president could have gotten away with it. This speaks to Hoover’s unique standing and status in the 20th century in American government.
LAMB: Let me just stop just ...
Time Wiener: Forty-eight years ...
LAMB: ... just for a second. But – but because of Hoover, the law was changed, wasn’t it? And – and ...
WEINER: Ten years.
LAMB: ... but Robert Mueller is beyond that.
WEINER: He has been asked to stay on 10 years by the president and Congress has said yes.
LAMB: OK, go back to the J. Edgar Hoover.
WEINER: All right. Well you were asking me to rank the directors and – and Hoover stands alone, like – he’s like the Washington Monument, he stands alone like a statue encased in grime.
As one of the most powerful men who ever served in Washington in the 20th century, 11 presidents, 48 years, from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon. There’s no one like him and a great deal of what we know, or we think we know, about J. Edgar Hoover is myth and legend. There was a movie still running in some places about Hoover. It basically ...
LAMB: Call J. – called J. Edgar.
WEINER: J. Edgar – the basically posits that the Cold War was the result of Hoover’s repressed homosexuality. Well, with all due respect to Clint Eastwood who’s a great film maker, that’s nonsense. Hoover persecuted countless thousands of gays in the government, chased them from the government because he deemed homosexuality as security risks. He conflated it with Communism. That’s a more important fact than gossip, that’s all it is, that the man liked to wear dresses.
LAMB: Go to that – I think I – most of the media, interestingly enough came to J. Edgar Hoover’s defense after that movie. Why do you think they would go there in a movie, but also where did that story come from?
WEINER: That Hoover was gay?
LAMB: Yeah, wasn’t it one source on that?
WEINER: It was half a century. It all started back in 1937 when Hoover started persecuting gays in the government. You know, up to and including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s favorite Assistant Secretary of State, drove him from public life.
LAMB: Who was his favorite?
Tim Wiener: Sumner Wells. And his enemies, and he had them, started spreading the rumor that he was gay, after all, there was a 42-year-old man who lived with his mother.
He was born and raised and lived with his mom less than a mile from where we’re sitting, just the other side of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress and when his mom died the following year, he lived by himself for the first time in his life, 43-years-old.
So his enemies, some of whom had been accused of Communism by Hoover, these are high ranking people in the Roosevelt Administration, started spreading the rumor that Hoover was a homosexual and the rumor never died. There’s no basis to it and no evidence. But it makes a good story. Right?
LAMB: I found this story, speaking of the whole Communist story and the government, this is a Reuters story that came out near the end of February, and I – I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Vladimir Putin praised Cold War Era scientists on Thursday for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets so that the United States would not be the world’s sole atomic power in comments reflecting his vision of Russia as a counterweight to U.S. power. Spies with suitcases full of data helped the Soviet Union build it’s atomic bomb, he told military commanders. You know when the states already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we’ve got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels, Putin said.
WEINER: Here is a rare example of Vladimir Putin speaking the truth. That’s absolutely true and to Hoover’s great shame and sorrow and fury, the Soviet’s were 20 years ahead of the FBI when it came to espionage. They penetrated, largely through moles and British intelligence, high ranking figures in British intelligence and a nuclear physicist, a German who was not only a great nuclear physicist but a secret Communist who worked on the – who was sent by the British to work on – on the Manhattan Project to build the bomb.
He understood not only how the atomic bomb worked, the bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but how the hydrogen bomb would work; infinitely more powerful, thousands of times more powerful. And when President Harry Truman found that out in 1950, he authorized the United States to build the hydrogen bomb and we were off on the Arms Race.
LAMB: Put in – put into context, though, we went through the McCarthy period ...
WEINER: That we did.
LAMB: ... where he was trying to, you know, out the Communists in the government and everybody on the left reacted, still some of them do to this day but in reading your book, you say a lot of that stuff was true back then.
WEINER: McCarthy over reached very, very badly. He was not a stable person. He was a drunk, the truth was not in him. But occasionally he hit the mark, he hit the bulls eye and every time he hit a bulls eye in his allegations of Communism, it was because Hoover steered his hand and steadied his aim with files, with facts. And it is a fact that Communist spies penetrated in the period of the 1940s and up to 1950, penetrated the Pentagon, the State Department, the military, the CIA and the FBI and Hoover had been chasing Communists and Communist spies since World War I.
He probably knew more about Communism than any person in this country outside the Communist party in the United States. He had made a very close study of it going back to its origins in this country. When the Communist party of the United States was founded in Chicago, Labor Day 1919, Hoover had five agents reporting to him.
LAMB: 1918?
WEINER: 1919. Labor Day 1919.
LAMB: Five agents?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: How many are there today?
WEINER: Are there in the whole FBI ...
LAMB: Mm-hmm.
WEINER: ... who are working issues of intelligence and terrorism? Over 10,000.
But it’s a rather remarkable fact that here at the founding moment of the Communist party in the United States, Hoover’s got five agents inside the building, including a Russian speaker.
LAMB: Did we ever figure out what the motive was for the Americans helping out the Soviets?
WEINER: They thought Stalin was going to win.
LAMB: But why did that look attractive to them back then?
WEINER: In the period when the United States was fighting fascism, fighting Hitler, aside from a rather awkward period where Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in the early days of – of the war in Europe before the United States got in the war, Stalin was killing more Nazi’s than Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt combined. And the attractions of Communism during the Great Depression, before the war were seductive to romantics, to people who thought Capitalism was failing and to, I would call them a certain class of limousine liberals who thought it was going to work. Well, we know better now.
LAMB: You take us through something called the Houston Plan.
WEINER: Mmm..
LAMB: Did you talk to Mr. Houston?
WEINER: You know, I didn’t talk to him for – for this book. He has rarely discussed it since he left the government and moved back to Indiana.
LAMB: Who – who is he?
WEINER: Well, Tom Charles Houston was a 29-year-old lawyer in the White House who – who worked for Richard Nixon, who admired Richard Nixon. And late in Nixon’s second term – first term, before he ran for reelection in ’70/’71. The Nixon White House determined that Hoover was losing his grip. Hoover was now past 75-years-old and he didn’t want to do some of the dirty tricks that Nixon had ordered him to, wire tapping, breaking, bugging, electronic surveillance, stealing people’s personal effects and doing it without judicial warrants on the order of the president.
So they set up their own bucket shop, didn’t they, in the White House, known as The Plumbers. Houston, from the White House made a liaison with Hoover’s intelligence chief at the FBI, Bill Sullivan. Sullivan, known to some of his colleagues as Crazy Billy, had been working the intelligence beat for Hoover since the ’50s. He wanted to take over the FBI when Hoover died and he overreached and he tried to take over the bureau when Hoover was still alive.
With this plan, which is known as the Houston Plan because it came out, you know, or originated in the White House but it was written by Bill Sullivan from the FBI and it would have essentially revived the entire program of warrantless wire tapping, break ins, buggings, don’t talk to a judge about this, do it on the president’s say-so that the FBI had been doing since Franklin Roosevelt authorized to do – do it in the ’30s. And Hoover wouldn’t do this for fear of getting caught. He thought it could ruin everything that he’d worked to build for half a century.
Well we know what happened 40 years ago this summer. Hoover refused to carry out this plan and Nixon went ahead and did it anyway. He set up The Plumbers, his own team of break in and bugging artists and six weeks after Hoover died, they got caught breaking into the Watergate into the Democratic party headquarters.
LAMB: Is there any excuse for Richard Nixon wanting this stuff done?
WEINER: Nixon felt, and on this point Hoover would agree, that the violent arm of the new left, the Weather Underground, for example, Weathermen, who were capable of planting a bomb in the Capital, of going to the Pentagon where you and I can’t go without security clearances and passes and planting a bomb in the bathroom.
LAMB: You mean this was done?
WEINER: They did it. He thought that the violent arm of the new left is fewer than 100 people who were actually building and – and – and planting bombs; was capable of overthrowing the government of the United States, that they were in cahoots with Beijing and Moscow. And this fear spread.
The FBI couldn’t infiltrate the Weather Underground, their agents, you know, had crew cuts and shiny shoes and white shirts and they couldn’t get good intelligence.
The fear that these people were somehow in cahoots with the liberal wing of the Democratic party and everybody who opposed the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement and in fact everybody who opposed Richard Nixon to Nixon’s left, 10s of millions of Americans were conspiring to overthrow the government and to somehow ruin Richard Nixon and his campaign for reelection.
Well this is a form of psychosis. He wasn’t the first president to fall prey to it. His predecessor Lyndon Johnson fell the same way.
LAMB: Take us up close to the friendship of Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hoover.
WEINER: Well they lived across from each other here in Washington ...
LAMB: At what time in their lives?
WEINER: From the late ’40s through the end of 1950s when Lyndon Johnson became Vice President on Leafy Street 30th Place in Georgetown. So they were across the street neighbors, they’d have a Jack Daniel’s every now and then or barbeque a steak and once Lyndon Johnson bought a dog for his daughters, they named it Edgar.
Were they friends? Not in the sense that you and I have friends. Hoover didn’t have any friends.
LAMB: But did they think they were friends?
WEINER: They used one another masterfully. Now here at CSPAN, you’ve got hours and hours of tapes archived of these two men talking together and these conversations are transcribed in the book, talking on the phone, Johnson recorded it. Johnson bugged Hoover.
And it’s extraordinary, the flattery, the praise, the stroking ...
LAMB: Didn’t he tell him I – didn’t LBJ tell him I love you?
WEINER: He said you’re my brother.
LAMB: Wow.
WEINER: You’re my closest ally in government and this lead to some extraordinary things like when President Johnson told J. Edgar Hoover to crush the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover didn’t want to do that. He thought the problem in the South there where the civil rights movement wasn’t the segregationists, he thought the problem was, as he put it, the integrationists.
But his president told him to do it. It was an extraordinary conversation where Lyndon Johnson says I want you to get the same kind of intelligence on the Klan that you have on the Commonists.
LAMB: Not Communists, but Commonists.
WEINER: That’s how they both pronounced the word, yeah.
And Edgar Hoover said, yes sir. And he and the FBI over the next three years, from ’64 to ’67 broke the Klan like dry twigs. Let’s remember that this was the most violent terrorist group in this country in the 20th century. They murdered countless people. They blew up churches, they blew up synagogues, they murdered children. They were pitiless people and Hoover and the FBI infiltrated them, sabotaged them and destroyed them.
LAMB: We’ll come back to J. Edgar Hoover.
William Sessions, you don’t think much of him in the..
WEINER: I would say that no FBI Director after Hoover ever got a grip on the job until the present director.
LAMB: Who appointed William Sessions?
WEINER: He came to the FBI under Jimmy Carter and he stayed under Ronald Reagan who then made him the head of the CIA.
LAMB: And he was a judge.
WEINER: He was a judge. He’s a extremely nice man if you’ve ever met him, just about as pleasant as you could be. From St. Louis, a federal judge, moderate Republican of the kind that you don’t see too much anymore, had excellent people skills. I’m not sure he ever got a grasp on the FBI.
LAMB: Let me read you a quote from your book, ”He would lose control of the FBI long before he lost his job.” How did he lose control?
WEINER: By not effectively exercising power. The power that the FBI has under law is nearly limitless with the signature of a judge and sometimes without the signature of a judge, they can read your mail, they can break into your computer, they can break into your house and do it in the name of national security and the defense of the United States of America.
Now Judge Webster and he always liked to be called judge, I don’t think ever got a grip on – on how to use this power in an effective way. He wanted it done in – in a legal way. He didn’t want to be caught violating the constitution like his predecessors but the FBI fell behind the curve in a number of ways in those years. For example, it was penetrated by the – by a Soviet spy who worked for the FBI, an FBI agent named Bob Hanssen, who stole pretty much every important national security secret you could get in the FBI.
LAMB: And is in prison.
WEINER: Yeah, but he – he ran wild for 22 years. I know, we shake our heads, how is this possible? Right? Any FBI Director, any CIA Director who goes to sleep at night without thinking that the enemy is sleeping in his camp is a fool.
LAMB: How – how did – well let me start with this. What one thing did you find that you put at the top of your list in all the research you did, a nugget.
WEINER: That was news to me?
LAMB: Yeah.
WEINER: That shocked and surprised me?
LAMB: Yeah.
WEINER: After 25 years of studying the question?
LAMB: Yes. Yes.
WEINER: Well I never knew that Hoover’s FBI ran a coup in the Dominican Republic. That was just amazing. I mean I knew that the United States under President Johnson, just at the time that we were committing combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, sent the 82nd Air Borne down to the Dominican Republic, which is as you know, is – is an island nation on the island of Hispaniola, half is the Dominican Republic, half is Haiti, to quell what they thought – what they feared incorrectly was a Communist insurrection run by none other than Fidel Castor.
Well the CIA didn’t have any good intelligence on what was going on. What was going on was that the duly elected president, his name was Juan Bosch, had been kicked out by a military junta and had fled to Puerto Rico, but you know who did have intelligence? It wasn’t the Army. It wasn’t the CIA. It wasn’t the State Department. It was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
The special agent in charge in San Juan, Wally Estle, amazing guy, amazing career ...
LAMB: Did you talk to him, by the way?
WEINER: He did an oral history. He – he’s gone now. He’s dead just a few years. Just an amazing guy. But he did this extraordinary oral history for the FBI.
Wally Estle’s a special agent in charge in Puerto Rico. He’s not only just tapping Juan Bosch’s phone. OK? He’s tapping every phone that Juan Bosch is using including public telephones. OK? And Bosch is working with his people back in the Dominican Republic to try and get back in office, after all he was the elected president.
And when Lyndon Johnson found out that only the FBI knew what was going on in the – in the Dominican Republic, he told Hoover to send a platoon, dozens and dozens and dozens of agents down there to gather intelligence and to make sure that Lyndon Johnson’s men got elected in a free and fair election in which the United States secretly kicked in millions of dollars over the course of the next year.
And these, you know, there – there weren’t a lot of Spanish speaking agents in the FBI frankly, it was, you know, still almost exclusively white male graduates of Jesuit schools and – and – and law schools. But there were – there were quite a few so they – they all got rounded up and put on a C-130 and headed down to the Dominican Republic and one of them said to the guy who was leading them, the Army officer, said why are we flying in with a helicopter gun ship? Why don’t we just drive? And he said the enemy has the roads. And the FBI agent said, the enemy has the roads? He didn’t know he was going into a combat operation. It’s an amazing story, but Hoover ran that country. He ran that coup, his agents penetrated every aspect of the political life of the Dominican Republic and they made sure that Lyndon Johnson’s man got elected with a lot of help from the United States. A lot of cash under the table, the guy served for 22 years.
LAMB: How long did you work on this book?
WEINER: Three years.
LAMB: Where would we find you when you were doing your research?
WEINER: Sitting in my house, my home in New York City, my apartment at a desk that was piled with declassified FBI documents.
LAMB: Did you have help?
WEINER: No, not on this one.
LAMB: You did all this research yourself?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: The oral histories, did you listen to them or did you read the transcript?
WEINER: They’re transcribed and they are unbelievable. It’s a society of former FBI agents that did this and they started on this program about 10 years ago and as far as I know, they’re used here with their kind permission because these are copywrited.
LAMB: Are they available to the public to read?
WEINER: Yeah, they’re on the web.
Extraordinary insights because the FBIs not just the director. The FBI is thousands and thousands of men and women who put their lives and our lives, frankly, on the line everyday, extraordinary people, extraordinarily dedicated people and now a days, quite a diverse bunch. It’s not – this is not Hoover’s FBI.
LAMB: Has a book like this been done by anybody else?
WEINER: There have been histories of the FBI. There have been biographies of Hoover, but to my knowledge none of the – no one has ever made use of these oral histories and no one has ever made use of these intelligence files from J. Edgar Hoover’s desk and to me, they cast the bureau in a completely new light.
We think of the FBI as cops. Right?
LAMB: How many oral histories have you read for this book?
WEINER: There are 208 of them. Some of them run into a couple of hundred pages.
LAMB: And you read them all?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: How, you know, in three years of writing this book, how much time was spent just reading?
WEINER: I would say two years reporting and researching and a year writing and by writing, I mean rewriting.
LAMB: How did you find the oral histories initially? I mean who – how’d you discover them?
WEINER: Well, I was trying to dig up, as I’ve done for all my books, enough material including enough new material so that every word can be on the record. I don’t like anonymous sources. I don’t like blind quotes. I don’t think readers should be asked to take my word for it, but if they can see every word is on the record, every assertion, every quotation documented, then they can have the faith that they’re getting the straight scoop. OK? And if it’s not the whole truth since nobody knows everything about the secret history of the FBI, at least it’s the truth.
LAMB: How much of your book came out of this FOI – the Freedom of Information request?
WEINER: When I read these thousand of documents that include J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files, I knew I had something fantastic on my hands because hundreds of these files are reports that would go directly to Hoover and he would write on them, paragraphs, sometimes long paragraphs with a blue fountain pen.
These are orders, these are commands, these are his thoughts, his biting sarcastic humor, sometimes his pettiness, but reading this material with Hoover’s hand written all over the pages, it’s like looking over his shoulder and listening to him think out loud. It’s extraordinary.
LAMB: Can the public see this?
WEINER: Some of it, yep.
LAMB: Where?
WEINER: I’m going to try put a lot of it online. Some of it has been posted by the FBI itself, they have an extraordinary program that they have not gotten credit for that has really come to fruition over the last three years since I’ve started working on this book called, you can find this on the web at fbi.vault.gov. OK? And these are declassified reports from the FBI that are just extraordinary. They’ve done a really good job there and they have a historian, John Fox, who deserves a lot of credit for putting this stuff out.
LAMB: So you’re in New York.
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: You’re in a room where you do your work.
WEINER: Yeah.
LAMB: Your family is what? What’s around you?
WEINER: My wife and my two daughters ...
LAMB: How old are ...
WEINER: ... and my dog.
LAMB: ... your daughters?
WEINER: They’re –my daughters are 15 and 12 and they’re good writers.
LAMB: If we go down the list of where you’ve worked, SoHo News back in..
WEINER: Way back in the 20th century.
LAMB: Kansas City Times.
WEINER: Good paper now dead.
LAMB: What do you remember most about coverage of the Hyatt Hotel when a 114 ...
WEINER: Oh my goodness.
LAMB: ... people were killed?
WEINER: I’d been at the Kansas City Times for I guess four months. It was July 17, a Friday in 1981. It was about shortly after seven in the evening and the paper had been pretty much put to bed. Folks in Kansas City get up early and pack it in early. And I was sitting in the newsroom along with about half a dozen colleagues and the police scanner radio just went wild. A disaster had happened and we didn’t know what at the Hyatt Hotel, a brand new hotel which was four blocks from the newsroom. So we just ran down there with a pen and a pad.
Here was a brand new Hyatt Hotel, they have great soaring atriums, you know, in the lobby that go four, five, six stories up and there were two concrete skywalks as they called them that traversed the atrium, brand new. They were hung from the ceiling with steel hander rods. There were 1500 people in the lobby at a very popular Friday night tea dance dancing to Duke Ellington music played by an orchestra and the skywalks fell down, 60 tons of concrete and steel on 1500 people, brand new hotel, 114 people died, 200 people we grievously injured.
We got there about five minutes after it happened, tops. And it was as if – I mean the only think I can compare to really is – is the 9/11 attacks, it was as if a jet – an airplane had crashed into the lobby. There were hundreds of people dead and dying. Why? Because the hotel had been put up in 1979 at a time when interest rates were 19 percent and they wanted to put it up fast. Not Hyatt, Hyatt managed the hotel. This is the people who built the hotel. They wanted to put it up fast, they wanted to put it up cheap and they wanted a nice pretty cover on it because interest rates were so high.
So when they went to hang these skywalks they didn’t have 120 foot hanger rods, they had 60 foot hanger rods. So they hung these two skywalks one on top of the other with an eighth of an inch weld and the thing was – you can see it, it’s pulling up here and it’s pulling down here, it was falling down from the day it was put up.
And we found out why and we – we won the Pulitzer Prize for it. It was – it was an old-fashioned muck-raking story to find out why.
LAMB: You won the Pulitzer in 1988.
WEINER: This is in – this is a group of us at the Kansas City Times won in 1982.
LAMB: ’82. You won again in – did you – you won again in ’88.
WEINER: That was – that was for when we first met. We were talking about the Black Budgets, the secret extra-constitutional spending of American intelligence in military agencies.
LAMB: You were at the Philadelphia Enquirer ’82 to ’92.
WEINER: Yes. A good decade.
LAMB: What do you most remember from your Philadelphia experience?
WEINER: Oh, the guy who ran the paper, Gene Roberts. Even met Gene?
LAMB: Yes.
WEINER: He is one of the few people I’ve ever met who may conceivably be touched by genius.
LAMB: He went on to the New York Times.
WEINER: He did. He – he had been there during the civil rights movement covering the South in the ’60s. He’s a good ole boy from – from North Carolina.
And when he was a cub reporter coming up, a little rural county paper in the middle of nowheresville in North Carolina. He was covering tobacco which, you know, the big industry down there and the editor of this county weekly was blind and the reporters had to come in and read their stories to him. If the story was badly written or badly reported, this old boy would pound on the desk and say I can’t see it, make me see it. A good lesson for reporters and writers.
LAMB: From 1993 to whenever, the New York Times.
WEINER: Until, yeah, 15 years, until just about three years ago. I was here in Washington, that’s when we met again. I covered the CIA for many years, national security. I went to Afghanistan many times before 9/11 and then after 9/11. Because I was covering CIA, I wanted to see where the results of American foreign policy and intelligence were happening. You don’t just want to cover the plumbing, you want to see what’s happening at the end of the spigot.
LAMB: I did find on the web a letter you wrote to a young grade school student saying that you twice turned down a request to go Iraq because your wife had a veto.
WEINER: We agreed when I started going to dangerous places, which I did – well we’ve been together for 20 years, I was doing it when I met her, that she would get – she would get a veto because why live in fear.
Now look, Brian, this takes us to a very sad moment. Thirteen of my friends have been killed or grievously injured covering war and terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. We lost two of the best this past week, Tony Shadid and Marie Colvin. This is a dirty, difficult, dangerous business but if we don’t it, who’s going to do it? Are dictators and tyrants going to run wild and nobody’s going to report on it?
Well, I did my time. I’m going to write books for a living now. I’m 55 years old. I have two teenaged daughters. But somebody’s got to do it.
LAMB: We’ve got to fill in the blanks. White Plains where you were born in ’56, Putney School in Putney, Vermont. What was that?
WEINER: That’s a very interesting school that was founded in 1935. I think the first co-educational boarding school in the country and it was a farm up on a hill in Southern Vermont and the kids ran the farm and fed themselves, you know, 100 head of dairy cow, big, big vegetable fields and it’s an interesting experiment. It had mixed results but I got – I got a pretty good education when I went to college at Columbia where I majored in history.
LAMB: And then you got a Masters in Journalism.
WEINER: Right.
LAMB: What – what about the video obits that you did ...
WEINER: Oh yeah.
LAMB: ... for the Times.
WEINER: They were fun.
LAMB: Is it over? Is that part over?
WEINER: Well, I’m writing books for a living now. They’re still doing video but so I can tell you in confidence that we have some extraordinary ones in the can but only one person decides when they run, that is the subject.
LAMB: And what is a video obit, by the way?
WEINER: Well, you know, the obituary is – is – is an art form. You’re trying to sum up somebody’s life and, you know, you might get 800 words or 1200 words so I though why don’t we just go interview people on camera like you and I are talking now and they’ll talk about their lives and when they die, we’ll put it on the web and they can have the last word.
LAMB: And you can see the Art Buchwald thing by just going on – just looking for it.
WEINER: Well that was extraordinary. I mean that’s the first one that ran and it was kind of a Dr. Watson come here I – I need you moment because he died. Now a days the world knows about it in 12 seconds. Well in 13 seconds, we had this video obituary up on – on the air and he said, ”Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died.” It was extraordinary.
LAMB: I want to go back to the book and another footnote. And by the way, you almost have 100 pages of footnotes. How long did you work on those?
WEINER: They’re part of the book. They’re my evidence. OK? This – this is why I do books entirely on the record. I want readers to know where I’m getting my information and if they want to know more, they can read on it.
LAMB: However, and as I read your book and there are a number of quotes and I went to find it and there’s no reference to the quotes.
WEINER: You don’t footnote your own footnotes. OK?
LAMB: You don’t footnote your own footnotes.
WEINER: No, you don’t put – put endnotes on endnotes. Usually those are continuations of the source material cited.
LAMB: All right. Here’s a – this is out of context but I wanted – I want to read this footnote.
WEINER: Brian, only you would read the endnotes. You are unique, I must say.
LAMB: The White House knew, thanks to Roswell Kilpatrick, a lawyer for Time and once JFKs Deputy Secretary of Defense. The magazine’s top editors had ordered their reporter, Sandy Smith to identify Felt as his own source then they betrayed his confidence by telling Kilpatrick who told his friend John Mitchell that Felt was leaking the FBI secrets.
WEINER: This is the answer to a very complicated – this is the end to a very complicated story that begins with a simple question.
In 1972, the Watergate break in happens. The Nixon Administration attempts to obstruct justice because they know the evidentiary trail leads way up to the top of the chain of command of the White House, Holdaman, Erlickman, Nixon’s right hand and left hand, John Mitchell, former Attorney General now campaign manager, John Dean, the White House counsel and ultimately the president himself. So they try to seal off the investigation. The FBI knows this.
Shortly before the presidential election in 1972 after it looks like the cover-up has succeeded, the press begins to publish stories and not just the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Nixon says well we can’t say exactly on television what he said, but he said where in the blankety-blank are they getting this information? And within days they find out it’s coming from the number two man at the FBI, Mark Felt. And there’s this extraordinary conversation between Holdaman, Nixon’s – how can you put it – lieutenant and Nixon saying – Nixon says, do we know who’s leaking? And Holdaman says yes sir. Is it someone at the FBI? Yes sir, very high up. Is it Mark Felt? Yes it is.
Now this is extraordinary. This was a secret that was kept a secret for 30 years. OK? The identity of Deep Throat.
LAMB: Why was that ...
WEINER: How do they know? OK? They know because their source is a lawyer for Time Magazine who has demanded that the reporter tell him the identity of his source.
LAMB: And then he picks up the phone?
WEINER: And calls the White House.
LAMB: When did that specific conversation with Richard Nixon become public?
WEINER: Oh gosh. I think just in probably the last decade.
LAMB: But I’m wondering why we had to wait so long to find out it was Mark Felt?
WEINER: There are hundreds and hundreds and hours of tapes from the Nixon White House that no one has ever transcribed and have never become public. Have patience. It’s only been, what, 40 years?
LAMB: And where did you find this story?
WEINER: That story is in the files of the Watergate special prosecutors task force and it’s right down there in black and white.
Holdaman tells Nixon we can’t go public with this because we’ll screw up our source and the source is Kilpatrick, the former Pentagon official who is now a lawyer for Time Magazine.
LAMB: But that Nixon tape has not been released yet?
WEINER: Yes, that tape is out.
LAMB: And how long do you think it’s been out?
WEINER: Oh gosh. I can’t tell you precisely, but a good long while.
LAMB: But I’m – I’m just again interested because do I remember you wrote the obit in The New York Times for Mark Felt?
WEINER: You have a good memory. I did.
LAMB: I’m just confused about why all of a sudden it took, I don’t know how long he’s been dead. He was what, 95?
WEINER: He was 95. I think it’s just been seven years. I think it was 2005.
LAMB: But you say in your book, let’s just go on to that because time is running by, that there are more Mark Felt’s.
WEINER: There were at least five Deep Throats.
LAMB: How – how could that be?
WEINER: Well because ...
LAMB: And why hasn’t Bob Woodward told us that?
WEINER: Well, because I – I can’t read Bob Woodward’s mind, but I think he only knew Felt. He had known Felt for – for years but there were at least four others who worked with Felt and they would meet at the end of the day and collate their information and, you know, Woodward and Bernstein, bless them, didn’t get all the Watergate stories, nor did they get everything right.
Sandy Smith at Time Magazine, Cy Hersh at The New York Times, remarkable Justice Department team, Jack Nelson and Ron Ostraw at The LA Times. They broke story after story and no one gave a damn frankly and Richard Nixon was elected in a landslide.
LAMB: And these guys would pick up the phone and call one of these reporters?
WEINER: You know, I doubt that they would pick up the phone at the FBI and, you know, call the Justice Department pressroom. No, I think that these were clandestine meetings.
LAMB: OK. Which Attorney General had the most difficult relationship with which FBI Director?
WEINER: Oh no contest. Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. These men hated each other with a burning passion.
LAMB: Why?
WEINER: Because Bobby wanted to exert his authority to run the FBI. He was the Attorney General, Hoover’s supposed to report to him. Hoover wasn’t going to report to this, pardon my language, young whipper-snapper. He ordered the people who gave the tour at the FBI building to say, well Mr. Hoover’s been Director since 1924, the year before Attorney General Kennedy was born. And Hoover did not submit to his authority. Bobby Kennedy didn’t like that.
LAMB: And Robert Kennedy had been – when he was 35 he – he – J. Edgar Hoover had been since 1919?
WEINER: 1924 Hoover took over the FBI and Bobby was born in 1925.
LAMB: What – what point do you demonstrate this hatred for one another?
WEINER: The conversations between these two men will sear the hair off the back of your neck.
LAMB: Where do you find those?
WEINER: Right in this book.
LAMB: No, I know that, but I mean where did you find them?
WEINER: They’re in the FBI files, they’re in Justice Department files they’re in the declassified documents.
LAMB: How do they know that?
WEINER: How did ...
LAMB: Where ever the – how did the material get its way on to paper of their conversations?
WEINER: Because they’re conversations are transcribed. There are Kennedy White House tapes, there are Johnson White House tapes just as there are Nixon White House tapes and every one of the Justice Department was witness to this.
LAMB: And somebody would run off and do a memo for the day or something?
WEINER: Well and Bobby Kennedy tells Lyndon Johnson after – after President Kennedy’s assassinated. Bobby stays on as Attorney General for a while and he says I have no relationship with Mr. Hoover. I can’t talk to him. He thinks I’m trying to run a coup to overthrow your government. And he did. Hoover did think that. And he describes his conversation for Richard Nixon on tape.
LAMB: Are we better off or not better off having had J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI?
WEINER: Now that is a big question. Forty-eight years, the man the FBI. There’s nothing like it in American history that a man would serve that long with that much power under so many presidents.
He built the FBI from a disreputable gang of cheap detectives to the most modern and effective federal force of its kind in the world. Every fingerprint that’s on file, every bit of biometric data, every surveillance camera on every street corner in every city owes its existence to him. He built the modern surveillance state. He built the modern national security state. One man.
LAMB: So you announce this in this book that you’re writing a history of the United States military. How can you do that in one book?
WEINER: The book is going to cover the period from after World War II to the present day. It’s going to look at the use of American military power through the prism of the office of Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The civilian leader at the Pentagon and the uniformed military officers who control the four services.
LAMB: When’s it due?
WEINER: Three years, give me three years. These books take three years.
LAMB: Last very important question, you are Tim Weiner.
WEINER: Correct.
LAMB: The next person you meet will call you Tim Weiner.
WEINER: Well I married a wonderful woman named Kate Doyle and our daughters are named Ruby and Emma Doyle and I thought for a minute I might change my name to Timothy Doyle.
LAMB: But why the Weiner, Weiner I mean ...
WEINER: These are – these are Germanic pronunciations that – that get mangled in English. You know, if you come from Vienna, it’s Weiner, but if your people, your ancestors made wine in the vineyards somewhere in the Austria/Hungarian empire like mine did, it’s Weiner.
LAMB: And why would your daughters take your wife’s name instead of yours?
WEINER: That was my idea. I – the entire male line of her family has died out. I have two brothers. It’s a good name.
LAMB: Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, thank you for joining us.
WEINER: It is a pleasure talking with you.
END
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The Washington Post • New York Daily News • Slate “Fast-paced, fair-minded, and fascinating, Tim Weiner’s Enemies turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today’s headlines.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath NATIONAL BESTSELLER Enemies is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history. Here is the hidden history of America’s hundred-year war on terror. The FBI has fought against terrorists, spies, anyone it deemed subversive—and sometimes American presidents. The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between protecting national security and infringing upon civil liberties. It is a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic.
Ne dediler?: “Outstanding.”—The New York Times
“Absorbing . . . a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals.”—Los Angeles Times
Söyleşi: Interesting People. Informative Conversations.
March 11, 2012 Tim Weiner Author, "Enemies: A History of the FBI"
Info: Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author Tim Weiner discusses his new historical narrative, “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” The book details the FBI’s 100 year hidden history of war against terrorists, spies, and ultimately any person or group deemed subversive. Weiner reveals details of secretly taped conversations FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Lawful and unlawful strategies against their enemies were reviewed. He writes about the agency’s predominantly illegal secret intelligence and surveillance techniques such as wire-tapping, break-ins, and burglaries. The author suggests that the FBI is in a constant tug of war between national security concerns and the protection of civil liberties. Weiner reveals how he researched recently declassified documents which included J. Edgar Hoover’s personal intelligence files. In addition, he talks about the major contribution to his research from scrutinizing over 200 oral histories of current and former FBI agents. Weiner discusses his early career as a reporter, sharing the story of The Kansas City Times’ coverage of the collapse of an atrium skywalk in a Kansas City Hyatt Hotel in 1981. The coverage won Weiner and his team a Pulitzer Prize. His second Pulitzer was received for investigative journalism on black budget spending while employed by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners. C-SPAN uses its best efforts to provide accurate transcripts of its programs, but it can not be held liable for mistakes such as omitted words, punctuation, spelling, mistakes that change meaning, etc.
BRIAN LAMB: Tim Wiener, in your new book, The History of the FBI, I want to read this paragraph. ”The Congressman demanded to see what else the bureau had on him. He became one of the first American’s granted the request to see his own FBI file. It included a letter that a suspicious nun had sent to Hoover four years before calling Father Drinan a Communist plant inside the Catholic Church.”
What were the circumstances?
TIM WEINER: Well this was a Congressman, Father Robert Drinan, from Massachusetts, very anti-war, pacifist, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat and he had been in the FBIs files for some years and in the – in the files, including those files were the – a letter from a suspicious nun thinking – saying that Father Drinan was, you know, a tool of the Communist party.
Well this was in the beginning of a long battle after J. Edgar Hoover died between Congress and the FBI over the powers that the FBI had exerted for decades under Hoover to gather political information, conduct wire tapping, plant bugs, hidden microphones in peoples’ homes and offices, break into their homes and offices and steal their personal effects and this was part of the great battle of the ’70s that resulted in the fall of Richard Nixon. The investigations into government misconduct by the CIA and the FBI. And eventually a passage of – of new laws had restricted the FBI.
LAMB: In that same chapter, you have the following quote. ”Reverend Drinan started shouting, ”They shoot to kill! They shoot to kill!” he recounted. I figured the guy had gone completely bonkers, Healey said.” Who is Healey and what were the circumstances?
WEINER: Healey’s and FBI agent and who had worked under Hoover for decades hunting Communists and he had the job of giving a Congressman a tour of the new FBI headquarters which is down the street here across from the Justice Department and the old FBI headquarters which was located in the Justice Department itself. And Reverend Drinan went to the firing – you know they have a marksman range down in the basement where FBI agents keep their shooting target skills up. And he asked what the bureau’s policy was on – on – on firearms. And Agent Healey told him, well you know, we – we – we try to settle things peaceably, you know. And then what, he said; and then we shoot to kill. And Father Drinan started going down the halls of the Justice Department yelling, ”They shoot to kill!” It was emblematic is why I have in – in – in Enemies: The History of the FBI.
This is emblematic of the kind of struggle that was taking place, just beginning to take place between the FBI as Hoover had left it after 48 years in power and the rest of the government of the United States. LAMB: What’s the story behind you taking 25 – 27 years I think it is on a Freedom of Information request?
WEINER: When literally a few weeks after my last book, Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA came out, I got a call from a lawyer here in Washington who had represented another reporter from the New York Times in a Freedom of Information Act suit that he, the reporter, had filed in 1981, 26, almost 27 years earlier. And it had just come to fruition after all this struggle and they lawyer said he’s not interested anymore, he’s moved on to other things. These are J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files. I’ve got four banker’s boxes of them. Do you want to see them? And I said, yes I do. And they’re part of the foundation of this book these are the files that Hoover kept on American intelligence from the end of World War II until his death 27 years late in 1972.
LAMB: We have a list of all the people that have run the FBI, both acting and ones that have been confirmed.
WEINER: It’s not many people.
LAMB: On the screen is Hoover; L. Patrick Gray; Clarence Kelley; James Adams, that was a short one; and William Webster was along one, nine years; John Otto William Sessions for seven years; Floyd Clarke, interim,; Lewis Freeh, seven and three-quarters years; Thomas Pickard, three months; and then Robert Mueller, 10 and a half years.
Who on that list would you put at the top of the list for being the most honest and who would be at the bottom?
WEINER: Well unquestionably, Bob Mueller, who has run the bureau for the last decade and will run it for another two years is at once the most successful, the most powerful and the most civil liberties minded, I would say, FBI Director in the history of the FBI which goes back 103 years.
Every day, Bob Mueller, who took office, God help him, on September 4, 2001, a week before this city and New York City were attacked. Everyday he has to calibrate a very difficult calculus. It’s like a tug-of-war. On the one hand, national security; on the other hand civil liberties. They’ve got to get this right.
In America, under the Constitution, we want security and liberty. We want to be both safe and free but these are opposing forces and they’ve got to be balanced.
LAMB: What’s the story about Bob Mueller in the Oval Office with the President, George W. Bush?
WEINER: Well, you’ll remember that in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush instituted a very, very secret program of electronic eavesdropping. The National Security Agency, which is responsible for the gathering of – of electronic intelligence by which I mean e-mails, telecommunications like cell phones, computer data, anything that can be transmitted by wire or by satellite through the ether of this country and around the world.
President Bush issued a very secret, very difficult and constitutionally very dangerous program to track and trap and trace e-mails and telephone calls from all over the world in the United States. Now if you send and e-mail from Karachi, Pakistan to Beijing, China, chances are that that e-mail is going to be routed through a server in the United States for a fraction of a second.
The United States government was trapping this material and trapping the e-mails and phone calls of Americans without judicial warrants from the secret court of federal judges that authorizes this. So this went on for more than two years. And by the start of 2004, Bob Mueller’s the head of the FBI, Jim Comey, the Acting Attorney General and John Ashcroft, the Attorney General – Ashcroft was ill in the hospital, you’ll remember when he found out about this program, it literally made him sick and he was rushed to Georgetown Hospital a few miles from here with acute pancreatitis. He could have died.
And that’s how secret it was. The Attorney General did not know the full scope of this program. There were probably 10 people in the government who did. So Bob Mueller, head of the FBI and the top two guys in the Justice Department, the Attorney General and his number two, determine that the program is illegal and Mueller writes out a resignation letter by hand, puts it in his pocket, walks into the Oval Office and said, Mr. President, this electronic eavesdropping program is illegal, unconstitutional and unless you skin it back and get it within the ambit of the law, I’m going to resign and so is the Attorney General and so is the Deputy Attorney General. Well visions of the Saturday Night Massacre under Nixon danced in President Bush’s head where two Attorney Generals went down, resigning in protest.
He was up for reelection. His government could have fallen as Nixon’s did under the impact of such a series of resignations. And Mueller won. And at that moment, the tug-of-war we were speaking of between national security and civil liberties began to become more even.
LAMB: How did you find that out?
WEINER: Just two years ago, the Inspector General of the Justice Department did a report in which he released Mueller’s hand-written notes of that meeting. Bush also describes it in his memoirs. And it’s clear, with all due respect to the former president, that he lied to the FBI. That is a felony.
LAMB: Here’s a footnote. Under the chapter Flaws in the Armor, Freeh’s book is a classic Washington memoir, though often dubius and disingenuous. I cite it only to reflect Freeh’s direct experience. Freeh distorts many aspects of his dealings with the White House. You also say in you book that Lewis Freeh refused to ever go to the Oval Office while he was the FBI Director in the Clinton Administration.
WEINER: Well, here was the problem. Lewis Freeh became the head of the FBI in September 1993, a few months into the Clinton Administration and he quickly determined that the president of the United States was not the Commander in Chief, but a target of a criminal investigation, which he was, a target of several criminal investigations run by the FBI.
Well this put Freeh, he thought, in a rather awkward position and during the eight years of Clinton’s presidency, these two men spoke face-to-face or on the phone five or six times.
Now this is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have silence like this between the FBI Director and the president or between the FBI and the CIA, which is also a serious problem. And this failure to communicate was one of the proximate causes of the success of the 9/11 attack.
The FBI under Lewis Freeh, with all respect to Lewis Freeh, great FBI agent, great federal prosecutor, fair minded federal judge, he had everything it took to be a great FBI Director except a sense of proportion, I would argue.
The FBI spent three more times money, people, manpower investigating specious allegations of Chinese campaign contributions and didn’t investigate terrorism in the 1990s.
LAMB: OK. I asked you earlier who would you put on top, you put Bob Mueller on ...
WEINER: Absolutely.
LAMB: ... that. Who would you put of all these FBI Directors on the bottom? And, by the way, add to that anybody you’re writing about, presidents or people that were around presidents, who would have been the most dishonest?
WEINER: Let’s start with the FBI.
LAMB: OK.
WEINER: God rest his soul, L. Patrick Gray, who died very recently was selected to succeed J. Edgar Hoover after Hoover died, nearly 40 years ago. And this selection was made by President Nixon who wanted to be blunt, a stooge as the head of the FBI. Gray had never run anything bigger than a submarine and suddenly he’s asked to replace J. Edgar Hoover? And Nixon is telling him, listen I’m going to ask you to do illegal things and you’re going to shut up about them and if asked, you’re going to lie about them. And Gray, poor man, saluted and said, yes sir. Here was the Commander in Chief telling him to lie, to keep secrets from Congress and to do whatever it took to uphold the presidency. Nixon was also running for reelection.
Gray was indicted for lying to Congress and other crimes and the Justice Department decided it wasn’t worth the candle. He was actually indicted first and foremost for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans along with his number two and three men at the FBI, Mark Felt, who we know better now as Deep Throat and Ed Miller. Gray and Miller were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans. They were pardoned by President Reagan early in his first term.
LAMB: While you’re on the Mark Felt story, I think you said, that was it Richard Kleindienst that told Patrick Gray to fire Felt five times and he wouldn’t do it?
WEINER: Richard Nixon wanted to fire J. Edgar Hoover and he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t have the courage, didn’t have the spine.
LAMB: Why not?
WEINER: Fire J. Edgar Hoover? I don’t think the president could have gotten away with it. This speaks to Hoover’s unique standing and status in the 20th century in American government.
LAMB: Let me just stop just ...
Time Wiener: Forty-eight years ...
LAMB: ... just for a second. But – but because of Hoover, the law was changed, wasn’t it? And – and ...
WEINER: Ten years.
LAMB: ... but Robert Mueller is beyond that.
WEINER: He has been asked to stay on 10 years by the president and Congress has said yes.
LAMB: OK, go back to the J. Edgar Hoover.
WEINER: All right. Well you were asking me to rank the directors and – and Hoover stands alone, like – he’s like the Washington Monument, he stands alone like a statue encased in grime.
As one of the most powerful men who ever served in Washington in the 20th century, 11 presidents, 48 years, from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon. There’s no one like him and a great deal of what we know, or we think we know, about J. Edgar Hoover is myth and legend. There was a movie still running in some places about Hoover. It basically ...
LAMB: Call J. – called J. Edgar.
WEINER: J. Edgar – the basically posits that the Cold War was the result of Hoover’s repressed homosexuality. Well, with all due respect to Clint Eastwood who’s a great film maker, that’s nonsense. Hoover persecuted countless thousands of gays in the government, chased them from the government because he deemed homosexuality as security risks. He conflated it with Communism. That’s a more important fact than gossip, that’s all it is, that the man liked to wear dresses.
LAMB: Go to that – I think I – most of the media, interestingly enough came to J. Edgar Hoover’s defense after that movie. Why do you think they would go there in a movie, but also where did that story come from?
WEINER: That Hoover was gay?
LAMB: Yeah, wasn’t it one source on that?
WEINER: It was half a century. It all started back in 1937 when Hoover started persecuting gays in the government. You know, up to and including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s favorite Assistant Secretary of State, drove him from public life.
LAMB: Who was his favorite?
Tim Wiener: Sumner Wells. And his enemies, and he had them, started spreading the rumor that he was gay, after all, there was a 42-year-old man who lived with his mother.
He was born and raised and lived with his mom less than a mile from where we’re sitting, just the other side of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress and when his mom died the following year, he lived by himself for the first time in his life, 43-years-old.
So his enemies, some of whom had been accused of Communism by Hoover, these are high ranking people in the Roosevelt Administration, started spreading the rumor that Hoover was a homosexual and the rumor never died. There’s no basis to it and no evidence. But it makes a good story. Right?
LAMB: I found this story, speaking of the whole Communist story and the government, this is a Reuters story that came out near the end of February, and I – I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Vladimir Putin praised Cold War Era scientists on Thursday for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets so that the United States would not be the world’s sole atomic power in comments reflecting his vision of Russia as a counterweight to U.S. power. Spies with suitcases full of data helped the Soviet Union build it’s atomic bomb, he told military commanders. You know when the states already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we’ve got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels, Putin said.
WEINER: Here is a rare example of Vladimir Putin speaking the truth. That’s absolutely true and to Hoover’s great shame and sorrow and fury, the Soviet’s were 20 years ahead of the FBI when it came to espionage. They penetrated, largely through moles and British intelligence, high ranking figures in British intelligence and a nuclear physicist, a German who was not only a great nuclear physicist but a secret Communist who worked on the – who was sent by the British to work on – on the Manhattan Project to build the bomb.
He understood not only how the atomic bomb worked, the bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but how the hydrogen bomb would work; infinitely more powerful, thousands of times more powerful. And when President Harry Truman found that out in 1950, he authorized the United States to build the hydrogen bomb and we were off on the Arms Race.
LAMB: Put in – put into context, though, we went through the McCarthy period ...
WEINER: That we did.
LAMB: ... where he was trying to, you know, out the Communists in the government and everybody on the left reacted, still some of them do to this day but in reading your book, you say a lot of that stuff was true back then.
WEINER: McCarthy over reached very, very badly. He was not a stable person. He was a drunk, the truth was not in him. But occasionally he hit the mark, he hit the bulls eye and every time he hit a bulls eye in his allegations of Communism, it was because Hoover steered his hand and steadied his aim with files, with facts. And it is a fact that Communist spies penetrated in the period of the 1940s and up to 1950, penetrated the Pentagon, the State Department, the military, the CIA and the FBI and Hoover had been chasing Communists and Communist spies since World War I.
He probably knew more about Communism than any person in this country outside the Communist party in the United States. He had made a very close study of it going back to its origins in this country. When the Communist party of the United States was founded in Chicago, Labor Day 1919, Hoover had five agents reporting to him.
LAMB: 1918?
WEINER: 1919. Labor Day 1919.
LAMB: Five agents?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: How many are there today?
WEINER: Are there in the whole FBI ...
LAMB: Mm-hmm.
WEINER: ... who are working issues of intelligence and terrorism? Over 10,000.
But it’s a rather remarkable fact that here at the founding moment of the Communist party in the United States, Hoover’s got five agents inside the building, including a Russian speaker.
LAMB: Did we ever figure out what the motive was for the Americans helping out the Soviets?
WEINER: They thought Stalin was going to win.
LAMB: But why did that look attractive to them back then?
WEINER: In the period when the United States was fighting fascism, fighting Hitler, aside from a rather awkward period where Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in the early days of – of the war in Europe before the United States got in the war, Stalin was killing more Nazi’s than Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt combined. And the attractions of Communism during the Great Depression, before the war were seductive to romantics, to people who thought Capitalism was failing and to, I would call them a certain class of limousine liberals who thought it was going to work. Well, we know better now.
LAMB: You take us through something called the Houston Plan.
WEINER: Mmm..
LAMB: Did you talk to Mr. Houston?
WEINER: You know, I didn’t talk to him for – for this book. He has rarely discussed it since he left the government and moved back to Indiana.
LAMB: Who – who is he?
WEINER: Well, Tom Charles Houston was a 29-year-old lawyer in the White House who – who worked for Richard Nixon, who admired Richard Nixon. And late in Nixon’s second term – first term, before he ran for reelection in ’70/’71. The Nixon White House determined that Hoover was losing his grip. Hoover was now past 75-years-old and he didn’t want to do some of the dirty tricks that Nixon had ordered him to, wire tapping, breaking, bugging, electronic surveillance, stealing people’s personal effects and doing it without judicial warrants on the order of the president.
So they set up their own bucket shop, didn’t they, in the White House, known as The Plumbers. Houston, from the White House made a liaison with Hoover’s intelligence chief at the FBI, Bill Sullivan. Sullivan, known to some of his colleagues as Crazy Billy, had been working the intelligence beat for Hoover since the ’50s. He wanted to take over the FBI when Hoover died and he overreached and he tried to take over the bureau when Hoover was still alive.
With this plan, which is known as the Houston Plan because it came out, you know, or originated in the White House but it was written by Bill Sullivan from the FBI and it would have essentially revived the entire program of warrantless wire tapping, break ins, buggings, don’t talk to a judge about this, do it on the president’s say-so that the FBI had been doing since Franklin Roosevelt authorized to do – do it in the ’30s. And Hoover wouldn’t do this for fear of getting caught. He thought it could ruin everything that he’d worked to build for half a century.
Well we know what happened 40 years ago this summer. Hoover refused to carry out this plan and Nixon went ahead and did it anyway. He set up The Plumbers, his own team of break in and bugging artists and six weeks after Hoover died, they got caught breaking into the Watergate into the Democratic party headquarters.
LAMB: Is there any excuse for Richard Nixon wanting this stuff done?
WEINER: Nixon felt, and on this point Hoover would agree, that the violent arm of the new left, the Weather Underground, for example, Weathermen, who were capable of planting a bomb in the Capital, of going to the Pentagon where you and I can’t go without security clearances and passes and planting a bomb in the bathroom.
LAMB: You mean this was done?
WEINER: They did it. He thought that the violent arm of the new left is fewer than 100 people who were actually building and – and – and planting bombs; was capable of overthrowing the government of the United States, that they were in cahoots with Beijing and Moscow. And this fear spread.
The FBI couldn’t infiltrate the Weather Underground, their agents, you know, had crew cuts and shiny shoes and white shirts and they couldn’t get good intelligence.
The fear that these people were somehow in cahoots with the liberal wing of the Democratic party and everybody who opposed the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement and in fact everybody who opposed Richard Nixon to Nixon’s left, 10s of millions of Americans were conspiring to overthrow the government and to somehow ruin Richard Nixon and his campaign for reelection.
Well this is a form of psychosis. He wasn’t the first president to fall prey to it. His predecessor Lyndon Johnson fell the same way.
LAMB: Take us up close to the friendship of Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hoover.
WEINER: Well they lived across from each other here in Washington ...
LAMB: At what time in their lives?
WEINER: From the late ’40s through the end of 1950s when Lyndon Johnson became Vice President on Leafy Street 30th Place in Georgetown. So they were across the street neighbors, they’d have a Jack Daniel’s every now and then or barbeque a steak and once Lyndon Johnson bought a dog for his daughters, they named it Edgar.
Were they friends? Not in the sense that you and I have friends. Hoover didn’t have any friends.
LAMB: But did they think they were friends?
WEINER: They used one another masterfully. Now here at CSPAN, you’ve got hours and hours of tapes archived of these two men talking together and these conversations are transcribed in the book, talking on the phone, Johnson recorded it. Johnson bugged Hoover.
And it’s extraordinary, the flattery, the praise, the stroking ...
LAMB: Didn’t he tell him I – didn’t LBJ tell him I love you?
WEINER: He said you’re my brother.
LAMB: Wow.
WEINER: You’re my closest ally in government and this lead to some extraordinary things like when President Johnson told J. Edgar Hoover to crush the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover didn’t want to do that. He thought the problem in the South there where the civil rights movement wasn’t the segregationists, he thought the problem was, as he put it, the integrationists.
But his president told him to do it. It was an extraordinary conversation where Lyndon Johnson says I want you to get the same kind of intelligence on the Klan that you have on the Commonists.
LAMB: Not Communists, but Commonists.
WEINER: That’s how they both pronounced the word, yeah.
And Edgar Hoover said, yes sir. And he and the FBI over the next three years, from ’64 to ’67 broke the Klan like dry twigs. Let’s remember that this was the most violent terrorist group in this country in the 20th century. They murdered countless people. They blew up churches, they blew up synagogues, they murdered children. They were pitiless people and Hoover and the FBI infiltrated them, sabotaged them and destroyed them.
LAMB: We’ll come back to J. Edgar Hoover.
William Sessions, you don’t think much of him in the..
WEINER: I would say that no FBI Director after Hoover ever got a grip on the job until the present director.
LAMB: Who appointed William Sessions?
WEINER: He came to the FBI under Jimmy Carter and he stayed under Ronald Reagan who then made him the head of the CIA.
LAMB: And he was a judge.
WEINER: He was a judge. He’s a extremely nice man if you’ve ever met him, just about as pleasant as you could be. From St. Louis, a federal judge, moderate Republican of the kind that you don’t see too much anymore, had excellent people skills. I’m not sure he ever got a grasp on the FBI.
LAMB: Let me read you a quote from your book, ”He would lose control of the FBI long before he lost his job.” How did he lose control?
WEINER: By not effectively exercising power. The power that the FBI has under law is nearly limitless with the signature of a judge and sometimes without the signature of a judge, they can read your mail, they can break into your computer, they can break into your house and do it in the name of national security and the defense of the United States of America.
Now Judge Webster and he always liked to be called judge, I don’t think ever got a grip on – on how to use this power in an effective way. He wanted it done in – in a legal way. He didn’t want to be caught violating the constitution like his predecessors but the FBI fell behind the curve in a number of ways in those years. For example, it was penetrated by the – by a Soviet spy who worked for the FBI, an FBI agent named Bob Hanssen, who stole pretty much every important national security secret you could get in the FBI.
LAMB: And is in prison.
WEINER: Yeah, but he – he ran wild for 22 years. I know, we shake our heads, how is this possible? Right? Any FBI Director, any CIA Director who goes to sleep at night without thinking that the enemy is sleeping in his camp is a fool.
LAMB: How – how did – well let me start with this. What one thing did you find that you put at the top of your list in all the research you did, a nugget.
WEINER: That was news to me?
LAMB: Yeah.
WEINER: That shocked and surprised me?
LAMB: Yeah.
WEINER: After 25 years of studying the question?
LAMB: Yes. Yes.
WEINER: Well I never knew that Hoover’s FBI ran a coup in the Dominican Republic. That was just amazing. I mean I knew that the United States under President Johnson, just at the time that we were committing combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, sent the 82nd Air Borne down to the Dominican Republic, which is as you know, is – is an island nation on the island of Hispaniola, half is the Dominican Republic, half is Haiti, to quell what they thought – what they feared incorrectly was a Communist insurrection run by none other than Fidel Castor.
Well the CIA didn’t have any good intelligence on what was going on. What was going on was that the duly elected president, his name was Juan Bosch, had been kicked out by a military junta and had fled to Puerto Rico, but you know who did have intelligence? It wasn’t the Army. It wasn’t the CIA. It wasn’t the State Department. It was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
The special agent in charge in San Juan, Wally Estle, amazing guy, amazing career ...
LAMB: Did you talk to him, by the way?
WEINER: He did an oral history. He – he’s gone now. He’s dead just a few years. Just an amazing guy. But he did this extraordinary oral history for the FBI.
Wally Estle’s a special agent in charge in Puerto Rico. He’s not only just tapping Juan Bosch’s phone. OK? He’s tapping every phone that Juan Bosch is using including public telephones. OK? And Bosch is working with his people back in the Dominican Republic to try and get back in office, after all he was the elected president.
And when Lyndon Johnson found out that only the FBI knew what was going on in the – in the Dominican Republic, he told Hoover to send a platoon, dozens and dozens and dozens of agents down there to gather intelligence and to make sure that Lyndon Johnson’s men got elected in a free and fair election in which the United States secretly kicked in millions of dollars over the course of the next year.
And these, you know, there – there weren’t a lot of Spanish speaking agents in the FBI frankly, it was, you know, still almost exclusively white male graduates of Jesuit schools and – and – and law schools. But there were – there were quite a few so they – they all got rounded up and put on a C-130 and headed down to the Dominican Republic and one of them said to the guy who was leading them, the Army officer, said why are we flying in with a helicopter gun ship? Why don’t we just drive? And he said the enemy has the roads. And the FBI agent said, the enemy has the roads? He didn’t know he was going into a combat operation. It’s an amazing story, but Hoover ran that country. He ran that coup, his agents penetrated every aspect of the political life of the Dominican Republic and they made sure that Lyndon Johnson’s man got elected with a lot of help from the United States. A lot of cash under the table, the guy served for 22 years.
LAMB: How long did you work on this book?
WEINER: Three years.
LAMB: Where would we find you when you were doing your research?
WEINER: Sitting in my house, my home in New York City, my apartment at a desk that was piled with declassified FBI documents.
LAMB: Did you have help?
WEINER: No, not on this one.
LAMB: You did all this research yourself?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: The oral histories, did you listen to them or did you read the transcript?
WEINER: They’re transcribed and they are unbelievable. It’s a society of former FBI agents that did this and they started on this program about 10 years ago and as far as I know, they’re used here with their kind permission because these are copywrited.
LAMB: Are they available to the public to read?
WEINER: Yeah, they’re on the web.
Extraordinary insights because the FBIs not just the director. The FBI is thousands and thousands of men and women who put their lives and our lives, frankly, on the line everyday, extraordinary people, extraordinarily dedicated people and now a days, quite a diverse bunch. It’s not – this is not Hoover’s FBI.
LAMB: Has a book like this been done by anybody else?
WEINER: There have been histories of the FBI. There have been biographies of Hoover, but to my knowledge none of the – no one has ever made use of these oral histories and no one has ever made use of these intelligence files from J. Edgar Hoover’s desk and to me, they cast the bureau in a completely new light.
We think of the FBI as cops. Right?
LAMB: How many oral histories have you read for this book?
WEINER: There are 208 of them. Some of them run into a couple of hundred pages.
LAMB: And you read them all?
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: How, you know, in three years of writing this book, how much time was spent just reading?
WEINER: I would say two years reporting and researching and a year writing and by writing, I mean rewriting.
LAMB: How did you find the oral histories initially? I mean who – how’d you discover them?
WEINER: Well, I was trying to dig up, as I’ve done for all my books, enough material including enough new material so that every word can be on the record. I don’t like anonymous sources. I don’t like blind quotes. I don’t think readers should be asked to take my word for it, but if they can see every word is on the record, every assertion, every quotation documented, then they can have the faith that they’re getting the straight scoop. OK? And if it’s not the whole truth since nobody knows everything about the secret history of the FBI, at least it’s the truth.
LAMB: How much of your book came out of this FOI – the Freedom of Information request?
WEINER: When I read these thousand of documents that include J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files, I knew I had something fantastic on my hands because hundreds of these files are reports that would go directly to Hoover and he would write on them, paragraphs, sometimes long paragraphs with a blue fountain pen.
These are orders, these are commands, these are his thoughts, his biting sarcastic humor, sometimes his pettiness, but reading this material with Hoover’s hand written all over the pages, it’s like looking over his shoulder and listening to him think out loud. It’s extraordinary.
LAMB: Can the public see this?
WEINER: Some of it, yep.
LAMB: Where?
WEINER: I’m going to try put a lot of it online. Some of it has been posted by the FBI itself, they have an extraordinary program that they have not gotten credit for that has really come to fruition over the last three years since I’ve started working on this book called, you can find this on the web at fbi.vault.gov. OK? And these are declassified reports from the FBI that are just extraordinary. They’ve done a really good job there and they have a historian, John Fox, who deserves a lot of credit for putting this stuff out.
LAMB: So you’re in New York.
WEINER: Yes sir.
LAMB: You’re in a room where you do your work.
WEINER: Yeah.
LAMB: Your family is what? What’s around you?
WEINER: My wife and my two daughters ...
LAMB: How old are ...
WEINER: ... and my dog.
LAMB: ... your daughters?
WEINER: They’re –my daughters are 15 and 12 and they’re good writers.
LAMB: If we go down the list of where you’ve worked, SoHo News back in..
WEINER: Way back in the 20th century.
LAMB: Kansas City Times.
WEINER: Good paper now dead.
LAMB: What do you remember most about coverage of the Hyatt Hotel when a 114 ...
WEINER: Oh my goodness.
LAMB: ... people were killed?
WEINER: I’d been at the Kansas City Times for I guess four months. It was July 17, a Friday in 1981. It was about shortly after seven in the evening and the paper had been pretty much put to bed. Folks in Kansas City get up early and pack it in early. And I was sitting in the newsroom along with about half a dozen colleagues and the police scanner radio just went wild. A disaster had happened and we didn’t know what at the Hyatt Hotel, a brand new hotel which was four blocks from the newsroom. So we just ran down there with a pen and a pad.
Here was a brand new Hyatt Hotel, they have great soaring atriums, you know, in the lobby that go four, five, six stories up and there were two concrete skywalks as they called them that traversed the atrium, brand new. They were hung from the ceiling with steel hander rods. There were 1500 people in the lobby at a very popular Friday night tea dance dancing to Duke Ellington music played by an orchestra and the skywalks fell down, 60 tons of concrete and steel on 1500 people, brand new hotel, 114 people died, 200 people we grievously injured.
We got there about five minutes after it happened, tops. And it was as if – I mean the only think I can compare to really is – is the 9/11 attacks, it was as if a jet – an airplane had crashed into the lobby. There were hundreds of people dead and dying. Why? Because the hotel had been put up in 1979 at a time when interest rates were 19 percent and they wanted to put it up fast. Not Hyatt, Hyatt managed the hotel. This is the people who built the hotel. They wanted to put it up fast, they wanted to put it up cheap and they wanted a nice pretty cover on it because interest rates were so high.
So when they went to hang these skywalks they didn’t have 120 foot hanger rods, they had 60 foot hanger rods. So they hung these two skywalks one on top of the other with an eighth of an inch weld and the thing was – you can see it, it’s pulling up here and it’s pulling down here, it was falling down from the day it was put up.
And we found out why and we – we won the Pulitzer Prize for it. It was – it was an old-fashioned muck-raking story to find out why.
LAMB: You won the Pulitzer in 1988.
WEINER: This is in – this is a group of us at the Kansas City Times won in 1982.
LAMB: ’82. You won again in – did you – you won again in ’88.
WEINER: That was – that was for when we first met. We were talking about the Black Budgets, the secret extra-constitutional spending of American intelligence in military agencies.
LAMB: You were at the Philadelphia Enquirer ’82 to ’92.
WEINER: Yes. A good decade.
LAMB: What do you most remember from your Philadelphia experience?
WEINER: Oh, the guy who ran the paper, Gene Roberts. Even met Gene?
LAMB: Yes.
WEINER: He is one of the few people I’ve ever met who may conceivably be touched by genius.
LAMB: He went on to the New York Times.
WEINER: He did. He – he had been there during the civil rights movement covering the South in the ’60s. He’s a good ole boy from – from North Carolina.
And when he was a cub reporter coming up, a little rural county paper in the middle of nowheresville in North Carolina. He was covering tobacco which, you know, the big industry down there and the editor of this county weekly was blind and the reporters had to come in and read their stories to him. If the story was badly written or badly reported, this old boy would pound on the desk and say I can’t see it, make me see it. A good lesson for reporters and writers.
LAMB: From 1993 to whenever, the New York Times.
WEINER: Until, yeah, 15 years, until just about three years ago. I was here in Washington, that’s when we met again. I covered the CIA for many years, national security. I went to Afghanistan many times before 9/11 and then after 9/11. Because I was covering CIA, I wanted to see where the results of American foreign policy and intelligence were happening. You don’t just want to cover the plumbing, you want to see what’s happening at the end of the spigot.
LAMB: I did find on the web a letter you wrote to a young grade school student saying that you twice turned down a request to go Iraq because your wife had a veto.
WEINER: We agreed when I started going to dangerous places, which I did – well we’ve been together for 20 years, I was doing it when I met her, that she would get – she would get a veto because why live in fear.
Now look, Brian, this takes us to a very sad moment. Thirteen of my friends have been killed or grievously injured covering war and terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. We lost two of the best this past week, Tony Shadid and Marie Colvin. This is a dirty, difficult, dangerous business but if we don’t it, who’s going to do it? Are dictators and tyrants going to run wild and nobody’s going to report on it?
Well, I did my time. I’m going to write books for a living now. I’m 55 years old. I have two teenaged daughters. But somebody’s got to do it.
LAMB: We’ve got to fill in the blanks. White Plains where you were born in ’56, Putney School in Putney, Vermont. What was that?
WEINER: That’s a very interesting school that was founded in 1935. I think the first co-educational boarding school in the country and it was a farm up on a hill in Southern Vermont and the kids ran the farm and fed themselves, you know, 100 head of dairy cow, big, big vegetable fields and it’s an interesting experiment. It had mixed results but I got – I got a pretty good education when I went to college at Columbia where I majored in history.
LAMB: And then you got a Masters in Journalism.
WEINER: Right.
LAMB: What – what about the video obits that you did ...
WEINER: Oh yeah.
LAMB: ... for the Times.
WEINER: They were fun.
LAMB: Is it over? Is that part over?
WEINER: Well, I’m writing books for a living now. They’re still doing video but so I can tell you in confidence that we have some extraordinary ones in the can but only one person decides when they run, that is the subject.
LAMB: And what is a video obit, by the way?
WEINER: Well, you know, the obituary is – is – is an art form. You’re trying to sum up somebody’s life and, you know, you might get 800 words or 1200 words so I though why don’t we just go interview people on camera like you and I are talking now and they’ll talk about their lives and when they die, we’ll put it on the web and they can have the last word.
LAMB: And you can see the Art Buchwald thing by just going on – just looking for it.
WEINER: Well that was extraordinary. I mean that’s the first one that ran and it was kind of a Dr. Watson come here I – I need you moment because he died. Now a days the world knows about it in 12 seconds. Well in 13 seconds, we had this video obituary up on – on the air and he said, ”Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died.” It was extraordinary.
LAMB: I want to go back to the book and another footnote. And by the way, you almost have 100 pages of footnotes. How long did you work on those?
WEINER: They’re part of the book. They’re my evidence. OK? This – this is why I do books entirely on the record. I want readers to know where I’m getting my information and if they want to know more, they can read on it.
LAMB: However, and as I read your book and there are a number of quotes and I went to find it and there’s no reference to the quotes.
WEINER: You don’t footnote your own footnotes. OK?
LAMB: You don’t footnote your own footnotes.
WEINER: No, you don’t put – put endnotes on endnotes. Usually those are continuations of the source material cited.
LAMB: All right. Here’s a – this is out of context but I wanted – I want to read this footnote.
WEINER: Brian, only you would read the endnotes. You are unique, I must say.
LAMB: The White House knew, thanks to Roswell Kilpatrick, a lawyer for Time and once JFKs Deputy Secretary of Defense. The magazine’s top editors had ordered their reporter, Sandy Smith to identify Felt as his own source then they betrayed his confidence by telling Kilpatrick who told his friend John Mitchell that Felt was leaking the FBI secrets.
WEINER: This is the answer to a very complicated – this is the end to a very complicated story that begins with a simple question.
In 1972, the Watergate break in happens. The Nixon Administration attempts to obstruct justice because they know the evidentiary trail leads way up to the top of the chain of command of the White House, Holdaman, Erlickman, Nixon’s right hand and left hand, John Mitchell, former Attorney General now campaign manager, John Dean, the White House counsel and ultimately the president himself. So they try to seal off the investigation. The FBI knows this.
Shortly before the presidential election in 1972 after it looks like the cover-up has succeeded, the press begins to publish stories and not just the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Nixon says well we can’t say exactly on television what he said, but he said where in the blankety-blank are they getting this information? And within days they find out it’s coming from the number two man at the FBI, Mark Felt. And there’s this extraordinary conversation between Holdaman, Nixon’s – how can you put it – lieutenant and Nixon saying – Nixon says, do we know who’s leaking? And Holdaman says yes sir. Is it someone at the FBI? Yes sir, very high up. Is it Mark Felt? Yes it is.
Now this is extraordinary. This was a secret that was kept a secret for 30 years. OK? The identity of Deep Throat.
LAMB: Why was that ...
WEINER: How do they know? OK? They know because their source is a lawyer for Time Magazine who has demanded that the reporter tell him the identity of his source.
LAMB: And then he picks up the phone?
WEINER: And calls the White House.
LAMB: When did that specific conversation with Richard Nixon become public?
WEINER: Oh gosh. I think just in probably the last decade.
LAMB: But I’m wondering why we had to wait so long to find out it was Mark Felt?
WEINER: There are hundreds and hundreds and hours of tapes from the Nixon White House that no one has ever transcribed and have never become public. Have patience. It’s only been, what, 40 years?
LAMB: And where did you find this story?
WEINER: That story is in the files of the Watergate special prosecutors task force and it’s right down there in black and white.
Holdaman tells Nixon we can’t go public with this because we’ll screw up our source and the source is Kilpatrick, the former Pentagon official who is now a lawyer for Time Magazine.
LAMB: But that Nixon tape has not been released yet?
WEINER: Yes, that tape is out.
LAMB: And how long do you think it’s been out?
WEINER: Oh gosh. I can’t tell you precisely, but a good long while.
LAMB: But I’m – I’m just again interested because do I remember you wrote the obit in The New York Times for Mark Felt?
WEINER: You have a good memory. I did.
LAMB: I’m just confused about why all of a sudden it took, I don’t know how long he’s been dead. He was what, 95?
WEINER: He was 95. I think it’s just been seven years. I think it was 2005.
LAMB: But you say in your book, let’s just go on to that because time is running by, that there are more Mark Felt’s.
WEINER: There were at least five Deep Throats.
LAMB: How – how could that be?
WEINER: Well because ...
LAMB: And why hasn’t Bob Woodward told us that?
WEINER: Well, because I – I can’t read Bob Woodward’s mind, but I think he only knew Felt. He had known Felt for – for years but there were at least four others who worked with Felt and they would meet at the end of the day and collate their information and, you know, Woodward and Bernstein, bless them, didn’t get all the Watergate stories, nor did they get everything right.
Sandy Smith at Time Magazine, Cy Hersh at The New York Times, remarkable Justice Department team, Jack Nelson and Ron Ostraw at The LA Times. They broke story after story and no one gave a damn frankly and Richard Nixon was elected in a landslide.
LAMB: And these guys would pick up the phone and call one of these reporters?
WEINER: You know, I doubt that they would pick up the phone at the FBI and, you know, call the Justice Department pressroom. No, I think that these were clandestine meetings.
LAMB: OK. Which Attorney General had the most difficult relationship with which FBI Director?
WEINER: Oh no contest. Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. These men hated each other with a burning passion.
LAMB: Why?
WEINER: Because Bobby wanted to exert his authority to run the FBI. He was the Attorney General, Hoover’s supposed to report to him. Hoover wasn’t going to report to this, pardon my language, young whipper-snapper. He ordered the people who gave the tour at the FBI building to say, well Mr. Hoover’s been Director since 1924, the year before Attorney General Kennedy was born. And Hoover did not submit to his authority. Bobby Kennedy didn’t like that.
LAMB: And Robert Kennedy had been – when he was 35 he – he – J. Edgar Hoover had been since 1919?
WEINER: 1924 Hoover took over the FBI and Bobby was born in 1925.
LAMB: What – what point do you demonstrate this hatred for one another?
WEINER: The conversations between these two men will sear the hair off the back of your neck.
LAMB: Where do you find those?
WEINER: Right in this book.
LAMB: No, I know that, but I mean where did you find them?
WEINER: They’re in the FBI files, they’re in Justice Department files they’re in the declassified documents.
LAMB: How do they know that?
WEINER: How did ...
LAMB: Where ever the – how did the material get its way on to paper of their conversations?
WEINER: Because they’re conversations are transcribed. There are Kennedy White House tapes, there are Johnson White House tapes just as there are Nixon White House tapes and every one of the Justice Department was witness to this.
LAMB: And somebody would run off and do a memo for the day or something?
WEINER: Well and Bobby Kennedy tells Lyndon Johnson after – after President Kennedy’s assassinated. Bobby stays on as Attorney General for a while and he says I have no relationship with Mr. Hoover. I can’t talk to him. He thinks I’m trying to run a coup to overthrow your government. And he did. Hoover did think that. And he describes his conversation for Richard Nixon on tape.
LAMB: Are we better off or not better off having had J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI?
WEINER: Now that is a big question. Forty-eight years, the man the FBI. There’s nothing like it in American history that a man would serve that long with that much power under so many presidents.
He built the FBI from a disreputable gang of cheap detectives to the most modern and effective federal force of its kind in the world. Every fingerprint that’s on file, every bit of biometric data, every surveillance camera on every street corner in every city owes its existence to him. He built the modern surveillance state. He built the modern national security state. One man.
LAMB: So you announce this in this book that you’re writing a history of the United States military. How can you do that in one book?
WEINER: The book is going to cover the period from after World War II to the present day. It’s going to look at the use of American military power through the prism of the office of Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The civilian leader at the Pentagon and the uniformed military officers who control the four services.
LAMB: When’s it due?
WEINER: Three years, give me three years. These books take three years.
LAMB: Last very important question, you are Tim Weiner.
WEINER: Correct.
LAMB: The next person you meet will call you Tim Weiner.
WEINER: Well I married a wonderful woman named Kate Doyle and our daughters are named Ruby and Emma Doyle and I thought for a minute I might change my name to Timothy Doyle.
LAMB: But why the Weiner, Weiner I mean ...
WEINER: These are – these are Germanic pronunciations that – that get mangled in English. You know, if you come from Vienna, it’s Weiner, but if your people, your ancestors made wine in the vineyards somewhere in the Austria/Hungarian empire like mine did, it’s Weiner.
LAMB: And why would your daughters take your wife’s name instead of yours?
WEINER: That was my idea. I – the entire male line of her family has died out. I have two brothers. It’s a good name.
LAMB: Tim Weiner, author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, thank you for joining us.
WEINER: It is a pleasure talking with you.
END
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17 mayıs 2013 cuma, Antalya, Türkiye
Harun Taner <harun.taner.antalya@gmail.com>
