At about the same time, the Justice Department discovered that the FBI bag jobs, which the bureau told Congress had been stopped by the 1966 directive from Hoover, had resumed after the FBI director`s death in 1971, having been used primarily against friends and relatives of Weatherman fugitives like John Fuerst.
But unlike the Chicago bag jobs of the 1950s, some of these illegal entries were still within the five-year statute of limitations that governs most federal crimes. Attorneys in the Justice Department`s civil rights division began drawing up an indictment naming dozens of New York FBI agents who had taken part in the illegal entries in that city, intending to prosecute the department`s own investigators for violating the very statutes they were sworn to enforce.
Though the prosecutors were aware only of the bag jobs in New York, the mood was one of near panic in Los Angeles and other FBI offices around the country where similar break-ins had occurred. The fear in Los Angeles, Swearingen says, was only enhanced when an agent from that office was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C.
Swearingen was among those concerned–he and the agent had done at least two bag jobs together in Los Angeles. But an FBI supervisor tried to reassure him by saying he didn`t think that the agent would ”open his mouth about the bag jobs in L.A.,” and that ”no one is mentioning the Donald Mohs caper in Santa Barbara.”
The fears in Los Angeles diminished when the agent returned from Washington to report to his colleagues on his interrogation by the grand jury. ”He said he was asked if he knew of any break-ins by the FBI against the Weathermen in Los Angeles,” Swearingen writes. ”He said he did not, and did not offer to clarify his answer.”
”That grand jury doesn`t know what it`s doing,” Swearingen quotes the agent as having told him. ”They don`t even know the right questions to ask. Even if they do call you, don`t admit to anything because they can`t prove it.”
”We knew that perjury was being committed,” one of the Justice Department prosecutors who worked on the investigation said in a recent interview. ”We just didn`t know by whom.”
According to Swearingen, the cover-up of the Los Angeles bag jobs went much higher than the individual agents involved, all the way to FBI headquarters in Washington. Just before his retirement after 25 years of service in May of 1977, Swearingen was having a conversation with a senior FBI official in the Los Angeles office when they were interrupted by the official`s telephone. It was an assistant FBI director calling from Washington.
”The statute of limitations hasn`t expired for a few of them,”
Swearingen quotes the L.A. official as having said on the phone. ”Those are the ones we have to worry about. The agents have to get together on their stories, or we`ll all go down the tube. We won`t have anybody admitting that we did any bag jobs out here in the 1970s.”
In all, Swearingen names 22 senior FBI officials who he says had personal knowledge of the illegal break-ins. But only two officials, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, were ever prosecuted. Both were convicted, only to be pardoned by President Reagan.
It was the overheard conversation, Swearingen writes, that ultimately prompted him to ”go public.”
”The bureau was ruthless in dealing with anyone who turned against it. I decided to do my own bag job on the FBI. I started collecting data to prove my allegations; I began writing notes about what I had seen and heard for the past 25 years.”
In seeking comment from the FBI on the most significant charges of malfeasance contained in Swearingen`s unpublished manuscript, The Tribune delivered a list of 14 multi-part questions to William M. Baker, assistant FBI director in charge of the bureau`s Office of Congressional and Public Affairs. In his letter of reply Baker declined to respond to any of the questions, except to say that many of Swearingen`s allegations ”have been found to be baseless.” Baker`s letter did not specify which allegations he referred to, or provide any details of an FBI investigation into Swearingen`s charges.
The only official investigation of which Swearingen has any knowledge is one he initiated himself in 1979, shortly after he retired from the bureau, when he made certain information available to the Justice Department`s Office of Professional Responsibility. Swearingen says he was told some months later that that investigation had been closed, either because the wrongdoing he alleged had taken place beyond the federal five-year statute of limitations or because no independent corroboration could be obtained.
In his letter, Baker wrote: ”The fact that his past allegations have not been substantiated by any independent authority indicates their lack of merit.” In fact, the FBI itself ”substantiated” perhaps his most serious allegation in 1979 in connection with a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Chicago public interest groups, including Business and Professional People for the Public Interest.
BPI had obtained an affidavit from Swearingen maintaining that the number of FBI break-ins in the Chicago area alone greatly exceeded the nationwide total of 238 acknowledged by the bureau. In settling the suit, the FBI admitted for the first time that its earlier assertions to Congress and the public about the 238 break-ins had been incorrect. ”Between approximately 1948 and 1966,” the joint stipulation in the case read, there were ”at least 500 black bag jobs in the Chicago area directed against approximately 50 targets . . . (and) there may have been additional black bag jobs, the documentation of which has been destroyed or cannot be located.”
The FBI also acknowledged that the break-ins ”were conducted to gather intelligence information rather than to obtain evidence for use in criminal prosecutions,” and that, ”if performed today,” they ”would be illegal.”
”Without Swearingen`s affidavit, they never would have admitted that,” said Douglass Cassell, the BPI`s general counsel. ”Without Wes, we never would have won that case.”
For Wes Swearingen, still living with his wife on their sailboat in a sunbleached Pacific marina, there is doubtless some small satisfaction in the FBI`s admission. But his decision to ”become a whistleblower,” the hardest of his life, is one he ponders still.
”I would suffer through more than a year of sleepless nights, countless nightmares and tortured conversations with family and friends,” he writes, ”before I would take the irreversible step of making public statements against an organization I once loved and respected.” His main concern was the reaction of his former FBI colleagues–what they would say, what they would think. But the answers were always the same. ”What became important to me was what I thought of myself. If I were ever to have any self- respect, I had to square it with my conscience and my country.”
