published 02/08/2011 at 01:54 PM EDT
The FBI director kept famous files on everything from Martin Luther King’s sex life to
never-before-reported secret meetings between RFK and Marilyn Monroe, as a new book reveals. An exclusive excerpt from Ronald Kessler’s 'The Secrets of the FBI.'
Complex man that he was, J. Edgar Hoover left nothing to chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building
what became known as the world’s greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office. So after Hoover became director, he began to maintain a special Official and Confidential file in his office. The “secret files,”
as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remain director as long as he wished.
Defenders of Hoover— a dwindling number of older former agents who still refer to him as “Mr. Hoover”—have claimed his Official and Confidential files were not used to blackmail members of Congress or presidents.
They say Hoover kept the files with sensitive information about political leaders in his suite so that young
file clerks would not peruse them and spread gossip. The files were no more secret than any other bureau files, Hoover supporters say.
While the files may well have been kept in Hoover’s office to protect them from curious clerks, it was also true
that far more sensitive files containing top-secret information on pending espionage cases were kept in the central files. If Hoover truly was concerned about information getting out, he should have been more worried about the highly classified
information in those files.
The Secrets of the FBI By Ronald Kessler, 304 pages. Crown. $26.
Moreover, the Official and Confidential files were secret in the sense that Hoover never referred to them
publicly, as he did the rest of the bureau’s files. He distinguished them from other bureau files by calling them “confidential,” denoting secrecy. But whether they were secret or not and
where they were kept was irrelevant. What was important was how Hoover used the information from those files and
from other bureau files.
“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” said William Sullivan, who became the number three
official in the bureau under Hoover, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in
the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does
that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”
Lawrence J. Heim, who was in the Crime Records Division, confirmed to me that the bureau sent agents to tell members of Congress that Hoover had picked up derogatory information on them.
“He [Hoover] would send someone over on a very confidential basis,” Heim said. As an example, if the
Metropolitan Police in Washington had picked up evidence of homosexuality, “he [Hoover] would have him say,
‘This activity is known by the Metropolitan Police Department and some of our informants, and it is in your best interests to know this.’ But nobody has ever claimed to have been blackmailed. You
can deduce what you want from that.”
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is seen in his Washington office, date unknown
Of course, the reason no one publicly claimed to have been blackmailed is that blackmail, by definition, entails collecting embarrassing information that people do not want public. But not
everyone was intimidated.
Roy L. Elson, the administrative assistant to Senator Carl T. Hayden, will never forget an encounter he had with Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison with Congress. For twenty years, Hayden headed the Senate Rules and Administration
Committee and later the Senate Appropriations Committee, which had jurisdiction over the FBI’s
budget. He was one of the most powerful members of Congress. As Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, suffered hearing loss and some dementia in his later years, Elson became known as the “101st senator”
because he made many of the senator’s decisions for him.
In the early 1960s, DeLoach wanted an additional appropriation for the new FBI headquarters
building, which Congress approved in April 1962.
“The senator supported the building,” Elson said. “He always gave the bureau more money than they needed. This was a request for an additional appropriation. I had reservations about it. DeLoach
was persistent.”
DeLoach “hinted” that he had “information that was unflattering and detrimental to my marital situation and that the senator might be disturbed,” said Elson, who was then married to his second
wife. “I was certainly vulnerable that way,” Elson said. “There was more than one girl [he was seeing]. . . . The implication was there was information about my sex life. There was no doubt in my
mind what he was talking about.”