THE BUREAU: MY THIRTY YEARS IN HOOVER'S FBI

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200610005-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2004
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: October 13, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

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The Bureau:
My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI
by William C. Sullivan
with Bill Brown
(Norton; $12.95)
The life and career of William Cornelius adapted with such ease to the Ku Klux
Sullivan are the stuff of a second-rate Klan, the civil rights movement, antiwar
political novel. They contain just the activists, and others who questioned the
right balance of ambition, intrigue, American way.
skulduggery, irrationality, and But there came a time when Sullivan
revenge-with a dash of nobility thrown began to annoy Hoover. As assistant
in for good measure. director in charge of the Domestic
A simple man of humble New England Intelligence Division, he was too
origins, Sullivan left his job with the outspoken-quarreling with some of
Internal Revenue Service in Boston to the central elements of the Hoover
become an FBI agent in 1941. From the dogma (by suggesting publicly, for
start, a whole new world opened to him, example, that the Communist party of
and he had some extraordinary adven- the USA was no longer a threat to
tures: chasing fugitives around the national security), making trouble in the
country, solving heinous crimes and Bureau's executive conference (whose
simple ones, investigating suspected ironic official duty was to vote unan-
wartime spies in the Midwest, enjoying imously, in the style of an old-fashioned
the camaraderie of a group of men communist central committee, to en-
whose image vas ever more glamorous. dorse every decision and the opinion of
Sullivan, however, was no run-of-the- the director), and challenging some of
mill C-man. He was intellectually the FBI's twisted priorities. Hoover
curious, and before long he became one chafed over such insubordination, yet
of the Bureau's rising experts on the continued to favor Sullivan with choice
communist menace; he worked es- assignments. Never was their love/hate
pionage, counterintelligence, and inter- relationship better symbolized than in
nal security cases, developing a whole the summer of 1970, after their feud had
coterie of young admirers and followers already become an open secret inside the
.who shared his excitement in that field. Bureau and out, when Hoover named
Sullivan stood out from the crowd: a Sullivan to the number-three job in the
quick-witted, wiry, fast-talking fellow, FBI; as the replacement for Cartha D.
often disheveled and disorganized, he DeLoach (Lyndon Johnson's favorite FBI
always looked older than he was. He was agent, Sullivan's leading enemy and
a worrier, and he would read books (and rival, and another early Hoover
underline and annotate them) while less sycophant whose relationship with the
.serious agents went off to bars and director had soured).
football games. Even in such a high-ranking job,
Like many other FBI men of his Sullivan resisted pacification. He gave
generation, Bill Sullivan aspired to speeches that annoyed the director, had
succeed the aging patriarch, J. Edgar suspicious liaisons with officials of the
Hoover, as director. The primary Nixon administration, and stood up for
evidence of this was the frequency and the victims of the director's arbitrary
vehemence with which he denied it. personnel policies and disciplinary
Denial was essential if one wanted to system. Sullivan cooperated in a White
stay in the charmed circle, because to House effort to reinstitute some
talk of replacing Hoover was to hint at domestic spying that Hoover, for
his mortality and fallibility, two reasons of personal reputation, had
problems the director would not admit suspended, and he wrote the director
he had. some outrageously insulting letters.
For years-even d.ecades-Sullivan Thus provoked, Hoover took the ex-
played along, outdoing himself to please traordinary step of forcing Sullivan out
Hoover. He developed new ways of of the Bureau by changing the lock on
-investigating Communists and other his office door.
''subversives." He designed, honed, and Hoover died seven months Iater, and
implemented many of the Bureau's Sullivan was to spend the rest of his own
no`Atbd' R4fAbeY0O41O/1 rem of Hoover's D'811P1~0 5-2
programs" (COINTELPRO), and reputa- ~
 tion. For a time he h"eM ma~ceerlQro
(first with an insurance crime-
prevention institute in Connecticut and
then with the "Office of National
Narcotics Intelligence," a superfluous
and somewhat mysterious agency es-
tablished briefly by Nixon's Justice
Department). He had some strange-
and never fully explained-dealings
with John Dean and others in the midst
of the Watergate cover-up, although he
later narrowly averted indictment over
his involvement with Nixon's 17 secret
wiretaps only by spilling various beans
to 'the. special prosecutor's office.
But mostly Sullivan passed his post-
FBI time at his retirement home in Sugar
Hill, New Hampshire, working on his
hate-Hoover campaign. An essential
tool in that campaign was the supply of
documents he had brought with him
from the government. During long,
rambling sessions with reporters and
investigators who came to call on him,
he would leap out of his armchair and
disappear for a few minutes to forage
through his extensive but chaotic files,
returning with a choice memorandum
or a tattered copy of a juicy letter that
demonstrated his point. Sometimes the
document would be trotted out on
various occasions to make several
separate points, and sometimes the
yarns and recollections would trail off
inconclusively. But Sullivan was an
"informed source" extraordinaire, and
few people complained about the long
journey to see him. When no one had
phoned or visited for a while, Sullivan
would take the initiative and call one of
his favorite leakees-sometimes from
the psychiatric unit of a New Hampshire
hospital-to put a new twist on an old
story. Usually something would get into
print or on the air, and that made him
happy. If things - came out in a way
unfavorable to him, however, Sulli-
van's rage knew no bounds; he once
threatened to kill me because he was
unhappy with the published excerpts of
a book I was writing.
But ultimately, nobody told things
exactly the way Bill Sullivan wanted
them told, and so he finally set out to
write his memoirs, with the help of a
television producer, Bill Brown. In the
midst of that project, on November 9,
1977, Sullivan was shot and killed in an
early-morning hunting accident near his
home-an event that excited the
assassination buffs and conspiracy
theorists for a while, but bore no fruits
for them.
Now comes the book, a loosely
organized and frustrAt - i l tipogrd
as h 004110/13 : CIA-RDP08-01350F
tid its that is an almost per ect retlec-
tion of Bill Sullivan-the man, the
bureaucrat, the raconteur, the ex-
aggerator and the teller of not-quite-
funny jokes. It is a book in which he
posthumously settles a few scores (with
DeLoach and other FBI folk) and reveals
much about himself: his desire to be
known as a "liberal Democrat," his
effort to sound and act like one of the
boys (the word "damn" appears so often
that it begins to stand out), and his naive
contention that his motives were always
pure.. I
Many of Sullivan's tales are trivial and
inconsequential, but a few are mis-
chievous. There is his own impromptu
three-bullet-but-one-assassin version
of the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in 1963, for example, in which
he departs totally from the story (and,
presumably, the evidence) that the FBI
has stood by for more than 15 years.
Perhaps the most useful part of the
11 book is Sullivan's chapter on espionage,
where he offers some ? startling
revelations about Soviet and American
penetration of each other's intelligence
networks. His suggestion that there was
for many years an undetected Soviet
mole inside the New York field office of
the FBI is, of course, a troubling one. So
is his triumphant story of what hap-
pened when Bureau agents captured a
US Navy enlisted man named Cornelius
Drummond who was passing secrets to
the Russians: "Drummond didn't offer
any resistance at all, but the boys gave
him and the other Soviet agents a
beating just for good measure." So
much for William Sullivan, the latter-
000200610005-2
day civil libertarian.
Finally, it is difficult to know how
many stories in Sullivan's book can be
trusted. In one, for example, he has
Lyndon Johnson ordering the FBI to get
involved in the investigation of Edward
M. Kennedy's 1969 accident at Chap-
paquiddick. (Richard Nixon was presi-
dent at the time, of course, and LBJ was
back on his ranch.) But with all. of its
(and his) failings, Sullivan's book is
important for two reasons. One is the
further evidence it offers of the
astonishing paranoia and infighting that
prevailed in the highest ranks of the FBI
for many decades. Listen to Sullivan on
the subject of the discovery of secret FBI
wiretap logs in the White House in 1973:
The existence of the logs never would have been
known to the press if it hadn't been for some of
my old enemies at the FBI. They thought by
leaking the story of my involvement with the
logs to the press ... that they could block me
from consideration for the job I wanted: a
special 'reorganization consultant' to the FBI
which would have resulted in their dismissal.
The second reason is something it
does not do: explain why no one an the
inside ever blew the whistle on J. Edgar
Hoover, one of the great tyrants and
frauds of American history. If Sullivan
had, then he might have become the
hero he wanted us to believe he was.
Sanford J. Ungar
Sanford J. Ungar, managing editor of
Foreign Policy magazine, is the author of
FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls
(Atlantic-Little, Brown).