In 1955 the FBI concluded that the Soviet Union was no longer using members of the American Communist Party for espionage. But the bag jobs against party members continued well into the 1960s, even after it became clear that prosecutions under the Smith Act were doomed to be reversed by the courts. The FBI, Swearingen says, continued to use the information it obtained from bag jobs to harass those it believed to be party members. ”It was an agent`s duty to get Communists fired from their jobs and otherwise make life miserable for them,” he says. ”Harassment was the name of the game.”
”I do not object to rough tactics against foreign spies,” Swearingen writes, ”(but) I know how easy it is to justify your illegal acts.”
Though most of Swearingen`s work was with the bag job squad, he was sometimes given other assignments. One came when the FBI office in Chicago received a directive from J. Edgar Hoover to open an investigation of Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson II, then preparing to make his second run for the presidency against Dwight D. Eisenhower.
According to Swearingen`s book, he and another agent were ”assigned to go out and see if there was a basis for the allegation that Adlai Stevenson had visited this homosexual bar on Division Street. Some citizen had made the allegation that Stevenson was there with someone this person knew as a gay. I think we hit bars all up and down the street. We talked to the bartenders and we talked to some of the people there. We were trying to see if anyone knew the man Stevenson was supposed to have been with. It was rumored that Stevenson was getting a divorce. Apparently Hoover wanted to make it appear the reason was another man. We did determine that he went to a gay bar one night for a drink with a friend, but in my estimation that does not make one a homosexual.”
Although Swearingen was then in full agreement with most of the assignments he was being asked to carry out, he balked when a superior handed him a list of books the FBI considered subversive and told him to go to the main branch of the Chicago Public Library and find out which Chicagoans had been checking them out. ”Back then,” Swearingen says, ”when you signed out a book, you listed your name and address. I could just go over and go through the books. They had the names right on the cards.”
Swearingen says he not only refused the assignment, ”I almost got into a shouting match over it. It hit me as being so offensive, I guess, because I`ve had curiosity about some of these things and thought I might like to check out a book, just to read a little bit. That doesn`t mean I`m sympathetic–the best way to understand somebody is to read what they wrote. I guess just for an instant I could see myself getting on a list.”
In 1971, following the publication of former agent William Turner`s book, Swearingen and other FBI agents were required to sign an agreement that they would submit the manuscript of any book they might write about their experiences on the job to the bureau for pre-publication censorship. The FBI deleted portions of 21 pages of ”Bag Job” which it claimed contained classified ”national security” information. Swearingen declined to discuss the deleted material for publication. But an uncensored copy of the manuscript on file at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress shows that among the deletions are the names and addresses of bag job targets in Chicago. Most of the excised material, however, appears to concern foreign counter-intelligence activities directed at the Consulate of Poland here after it reopened in 1959.
One such effort involved the FBI`s opening of mail addressed to the consulate, a program similar to those in several other U.S. cities that the FBI acknowledged in testimony before the Senate`s Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1975. The committee found the bureau`s mail-opening programs to have been illegal and reported that ”bureau officials who supervised these programs have testified that legal considerations were simply not raised at the time.” Oddly, however, Chicago was not one of the cities mentioned in the committee`s report, and James Z. Dick, a Washington attorney who was staff counsel to the committee, said in a telephone interview that he could not recall ever having been told of any FBI mail-opening program in Chicago. Dick added that the FBI would have been in contempt of Congress if it had in fact failed to turn over information about mail-opening in Chicago.
Wes Swearingen liked Chicago, where he joined the Columbia Yacht Club and acquired the passion for sailing that remains with him to this day. It was at the club that he met his wife, Paula, an interior designer who had worked for Henry Wallace in 1948 when he ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket. Even though Wallace had been Franklin Roosevelt`s vice president, he was anathema to the FBI, and when Swearingen mentioned his wife`s political involvement to his supervisor, he was pointedly told that ”Caesar`s wife must be above reproach.”
Two weeks after their marriage, in November of 1962, Swearingen was transferred to Kentucky, where he spent the next 1/2 years in exile, chasing car thieves. It was not until after he retired that Swearingen, having obtained portions of his own FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, learned that his transfer had been the direct result of his wife`s political leanings.
One of the FBI memos noted that although ”Special Agent Swearingen has had an excellent record thus far . . . his judgment in permitting himself to become involved in a marital situation is questionable, even though there is no evidence of leftist-type activty on the part of his wife subsequent to 1951.” The document concluded that ”in the best interests of the bureau, Swearingen should be transferred from the Chicago area . . . to an office where security-type work is not as prominent a part of the office
responsibilities as is the case in the Chicago area.”
In 1969 Swearingen, presumably rehabilitated, was transferred from Kentucky to New York City, the largest of all FBI field offices, and it was there that his view of the FBI first began to sour. ”Productivity was the lowest per agent,” he writes. ”Many agents gave up just because of the size of the city. Others stopped working just because it was easy to hide. One agent spent his on-duty time at the racetrack. Others became art experts. Some agents passed their days by `badging` their way into movie theaters to catch the latest films. Then there were the total wipeouts, the office alcoholics who kept the neighborhood barstools warm from morning till night, when their car pools picked them up and drove them home to the suburbs.”
Because Swearingen had handled some bombing cases in Kentucky that grew out of a coal miners` strike, the New York office assigned him the case of Sam Melville, a member of the Weather Underground whom the FBI believed responsible for many of the bombings in and around New York during those turbulent years. When Melville was arrested a few months later, Swearingen received two rewards–another commendation and a transfer to his ”office of preference,” Los Angeles.
No sooner had he arrived in California than he was given the case of another suspected Weatherman bomber–John Fuerst, a New York radical who had recently purchased a case of dynamite in Tucson and was believed to be somewhere in the West looking for targets. In its zeal to track down Fuerst, the FBI soon resorted to the old tactic of breaking and entering that Swearingen had learned so well in Chicago and which he thought by then had been laid to rest. Before long, Swearingen and his colleagues on the ”Weather Underground” squad were paying nocturnal visits to the Los Angeles-area homes of several radicals, including a group of students from UCLA, whom they believed to be friends of Fuerst.
No clues to Fuerst`s whereabouts were ever found, and none of the targets was ever charged with a crime. ”It was kind of a case of guilt by association,” Swearingen says. ”The phraseology we used was that they were
`known associates` of Weatherman fugitive John Fuerst. One woman loans her car to John Fuerst, these people are associating with her, so everybody else is guilty.”
One of the Southern California bag jobs did produce an arrest and conviction quite by happenstance, through an FBI operation aimed at tracking down fugitives who had assumed the identities of dead children by using copies of their birth certificates. Agents in Los Angeles would obtain records of deceased children from the county recorder`s office, then run the names through the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento. If a dead baby turned up with a current driver`s license, the FBI assumed the license-holder must be someone on the run from the law.
One name that turned up was that of Donald Mohs, who had died in infancy back in the 1940s. But now Donald Mohs was alive and well and living in Santa Barbara. According to Swearingen`s book, one July day in 1971 two FBI agents from Los Angeles broke into ”Mohs` ” house and discovered that he was really one Albert K. Field, a bail jumper from a marijuana-smuggling charge in Arizona. Field was arrested, tried and convicted for smuggling, Swearingen said, without ever having learned that the evidence against him had been acquired through an illegal break-in.
The last bag job of which Swearingen knows occurred in 1975, after the owner of a Hollywood sound-dubbing company called the FBI office in Los Angeles to report that Emile de Antonio, the radical film maker, was using his studio to edit the sound track for a film on the Weather Underground. The man, Swearingen writes, gave the FBI a copy of the soundtrack. But the bureau wanted the film itself, so FBI agents broke into De Antonio`s apartment in New York City. They found nothing.
In addition to breaking the law on its own, Swearingen writes, the FBI routinely covered up violations of law by local police departments. Though the bureau received ”information from the Chicago Police Department Red Squad which it had obtained from illegal wiretaps,” he says, ”we never reported any of these violations to the United States Attorney.” Nor, he says, was any report made when an FBI undercover agent from the Los Angeles office, assigned to mix with demonstrators at the 1972 Republican convention in Miami Beach, was badly beaten by Miami police officers.
According to his book, however, the FBI has been equally protective of misdeeds within its ranks. Most prevalent were work-rule violations. In the New York office, Swearingen writes, agents were required to sign in on time each morning but were permitted to leave work at midday–to take a so-called
”noon balloon.” The FBI office in Los Angeles was equally relaxed; agents there routinely signed in two or three hours early, awarding themselves automatic overtime at the taxpayers` expense.
Another violation merely winked at, Swearingen says, concerned the FBI chemist in Washington who somehow ”cracked” the formula for Chanel No. 5 and did a brisk business for years selling the counterfeit perfume to other agents at $5 a bottle. ”It came in these little Chanel bottles,” Swearingen says.
”You could order it from the office. They used to have Christmas order lists.”
Though a variety of infractions occurred, none of the perpetrators were ever charged or prosecuted. One agent, arrested at a gay bar after he solicited an undercover Los Angeles policeman, was allowed to resign. So was an agent caught by the police molesting schoolgirls in his FBI car (the man later obtained a job as head of security for a large corporation).
One of the brightest moments in the FBI`s history was the scandal known as Watergate. Though prosecutors in the Justice Department were less than zealous in their early pursuit of the case, by all accounts the FBI agents assigned to investigate wrongdoing by Richard Nixon and his aides were relentless in their search for the facts. But it was the post-Watergate scrutiny by Congress of the U.S. intelligence community that spawned the first of many questions about how the FBI had spent the two previous decades combating what it perceived as threats to domestic security.
One tactic that emerged was the FBI`s list, known as the ”Security Index,” of American citizens who were ”deemed dangerous to the internal security of the country” and who were to be rounded up and imprisoned in the event of a ”national emergency.” Senate investigators were later told that the Security Index had contained about 26,000 names at its peak. But Swearingen writes that the true figure ”was much higher than that–Chicago alone had an index of 50,000 names.”
The list contained the names of every known member of the Communist Party. But membership in the party was just one of many criteria that could get a person on the detention list for life. (The list also contained the names of author Norman Mailer and a college professor who had merely ”praised the Soviet Union to his class.”) In 1971, when Congress finally repealed the Cold War era Emergency Detention Act and the FBI lost whatever statutory authority had once existed for the Security Index, the bureau informed Congress that the Index had been ”destroyed.”
According to Swearingen, however, most of the Security Index file cards were simply stamped ”canceled” and left where they were, while the rest were transferred to a new filing cabinet named the ”Administrative Index,” or ADEX–”a change,” he writes, ”in name only.” Swearingen was among the Los Angeles agents chosen to decide which file cards to reassign, and one that troubled him in particular was that of an 80-year-old woman who had been spotted five years before at a Fourth of July picnic sponsored by the Communist Party.
When Swearingen recommended that the woman`s name not be placed on the ADEX, he was overruled by his supervisor. ”I waited one month,” he writes,
”then destroyed the memo on the picnic and submitted a second recommendation that the old woman be deleted from the ADEX.” She was.
According to Swearingen, a similar sort of deception took place when Congress decided to find out just how many ”domestic security”
investigations, like the ones in Chicago in the 1950s, had actually resulted in criminal convictions. Teams of auditors from the General Accounting Office were dispatched to several FBI field offices, including Los Angeles, to examine the security files, and the FBI was ready for them. Before the auditors arrived, Swearingen says, ”We put 20 or 25 agents on special assignment. All they did was review files all day long. They reviewed every security file in the office. The purpose was to see if there was anything that was embarrassing to the FBI.”
Only those investigative files that were ”squeaky clean” were given to the congressional investigators, Swearingen says. As it was, the GAO investigators found that only 3 percent of the national security cases investigated by the FBI were ever referred for prosecution, and that only 1.3 percent had resulted in convictions. Had the investigators seen a true cross section of the bureau`s files, Swearingen says, the percentages would have been much lower.
