Wiretap Briefing

Taken from The Week Magazine, Jan 27, 2006, Vol 6, Iss 243, pg 13

President Bush recently found himself in a firestorm when The New York Times reported that he had secretly authorized domestic wiretaps on hundreds of people within the U.S. Has the government ever done anything like this before?

When did government wiretapping begin: As soon as the use of telephones became widespread, in the 1920s. J. Edgar Hoover, the newly named head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was the first to make use of wiretaps and bugs (planted listening devices), targeting bootleggers during Prohibition. At the time, several states had outlawed wiretaps, but there was no federal law against them. The U.S. Supreme Court said the wiretaps and bugs were constitutional as long as agents didn't have to break into a building to plant the listening equipment. Congress soon grew alarmed by Hoover's fondness for planting bugs without any oversight, and outlawed wiretapping in 1934. But as World War II approached, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided there would have to be exceptions to the rule.

What exceptions: FDR worried that there might be Japanese or German spies or sympathizers within the U.S., and he believed that the security of the nation trumped the law against wiretapping. Without the consent of Congress, Roosevelt quietly instructed both his attorney general, Robert Jackson, and Hoover to use "listening devices" to eavesdrop on "persons suspected of subversive activities." As war loomed, Hoover focused his surveillance on Axis diplomats, then turned his attention to German and Japanese immigrants whose loyalty he questioned. When the war ended, communists became the nation's most feared enemy, and Harry Truman's attorney general, Tom Clark, expanded the policy to allow for bugging of "domestic subversives" as well.

Was this surveillance justified: In some cases it was. In the 1950s and '60s, literally hundreds of Americans with communist sympathies provided information to Soviet intelligence. American spies helped the rival superpower steal the scientific secrets behind the atomic bomb and a host of other intelligence prizes. The FBI used surveillance and intercepted cables to reel in several high-profile suspects, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and in a single sweep the Truman administration purged hundreds of suspected communists from the federal government. But under Hoover, the FBI didn't limit its wiretapping to actual communist spies. It also spied on thousands of American citizens deemed radical, unpatriotic, or subversive.

Who were his targets: Everyone from street protesters to newspaper reporters to movie actresses to presidents of the United States. Hoover, according to Curt Gentry's book J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, ordered files to be created on a host of prominent politicians, filling them with what one official called "political cancer"—sexual gossip, speculations on their loyalty, and other dirt he sometimes used to blackmail them. Among those in Hoover's files was John F. Kennedy. During World War II, when Kennedy was a young Navy officer from a prominent Democratic family, agents bugged a Charleston, S.C., hotel room where Kennedy had a fling with a suspected Nazi spy, Inga Fejos. Hoover had the file transferred to his office around the time Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic nomination. Hoover's FBI also used unauthorized wiretaps, bugs, and burglaries to dig up dirt on what Hoover called the "jackals in the press." He ordered agents to open syndicated columnist Drew Pearson's mail, and to tail leftist journalist I.F. Stone. Hoover even dissuaded a magazine from printing a story on the FBI by anonymously sending the publisher photos of his wife engaged in a sex act with her chauffeur.

How did Hoover react to the 1960s: He saw both the civil-rights movement and the growing protests against the Vietnam War as subversive, and aggressively spied on those movements' leaders. In October 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized Hoover to wiretap the telephones of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The FBI said the surveillance was necessary because one of the civil-rights leader's top aides was a high-ranking member of the American Communist Party. In reality, Hoover saw King as a dangerous troublemaker. With its phone taps and bugs planted in King's hotel rooms, the FBI found no evidence that King was a communist. But it did record evidence that King was having extramarital affairs. To discredit King, agents invited reporters to listen to tape recordings of his sexual encounters. Agents even sent a copy of a surveillance tape to King's home, hoping that his wife would hear it and divorce him, thus destroying his standing with black churches.

When did such spying peak: During the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon was even more enthusiastic about secret recordings and dirty tricks than Hoover. As the Vietnam War divided the country, he and his attorney general, John Mitchell, directed the FBI and other agencies to spy on anti-war organizations, campus groups, black radicals, and newspaper reporters. Nixon even ordered taps on members of his own administration, and on his brother, Donald. Tapes recorded in the Oval Office later revealed Nixon telling aides, "I want more use of wiretapping," and directing them to target prominent political opponents. "Maybe we can get a scandal on any one of the leading Democrats," he told Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in 1971. Later, Nixon had to resign over the Watergate scandal, which began when five men hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel. Their goal, that night, was to place a phone tap.