”That was something new back in those days,” Swearingen says. ”It had several tumblers in it. This agent took one look at the lock and said,
`Where`s the back door?` ” Though locked with a dead bolt, the back door presented no particular problem. ”He pulled out a spring with a long wire coil on it and he was in there within 30 seconds. He was good.” Sennett, who like most of the FBI`s break-in targets was never arrested or charged with a crime, said in an interview that Wes Swearingen had paid him a visit while researching his book. ”He told me that I`d been broken into a dozen times,” Sennett recalls. In 1958, still troubled by the Soviet invasion of Hungary two years before, Sennett quit the Communist Party. He says he has since obtained portions of his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, documents which show that ”even though I had nothing to do with the party after that, the FBI kept tabs on me until 1973.”
The FBI`s principal break-in targets were the Communist Party and its various appendages in and around Chicago, as well as such left-wing political organizations as the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and the Civil Rights Congress that the FBI believed (not always incorrectly) to be nothing more than communist front groups. ”Anything that had the name
`committee` or `congress` the FBI assumed had to be subversive,”
Swearingen says. ”If they had an office in Chicago, you can be sure at one time or another they were bagged. If they weren`t, it was for some security reason–we couldn`t get the keys, or it just wasn`t worth the risk.”
”Some of the offices were such that we couldn`t go in there for some physical reason, like there was always somebody there. Some people would take the sensitive stuff home with them. But if everything else was equal, then we`d go in. If you didn`t find anything the first time around, you`d kind of sit back and wait for something else to develop and try it again.”
According to Swearingen, however, the FBI`s break-in targets also included other groups and individuals with no apparent communist ties. He recalls, for example, breaking into the Chicago offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the United Electrical Workers Union, the National Lawyers Guild, the homes of top labor union officials ”and many others that fade into the menagerie of hundreds of illegal FBI operations.” Asked why the United Electrical Workers had been selected as a target, another longtime Chicago FBI agent expressed puzzlement. ”There were some corrupt ones there,” the agent said, ”but I don`t remember any Communists in the United Electrical Workers.”
An even more puzzling target was the Nation of Islam, since the FBI never argued, even internally, that the Black Muslims were communist-influenced. ”If it didn`t conform to the standard all-American philosophy of what the United States is supposed to be,” Swearingen says, ”that`s enough to make them an enemy of the government.” Perhaps ironically, the Muslims proved the toughest target of all. ”We wanted to get into their
headquarters,” Swearingen says, ”but it was so well-protected we couldn`t even get within a block. They had guards outside, on the front porch and out on the street. We couldn`t even drive by.” So the FBI did the next best thing, breaking into the homes of individual Muslims, among them a South Side married couple whose home was ”bagged” by the FBI every other week for more than a year.
Those break-ins and others involved the most stringent security. ”A bag job,” Swearingen writes, ”is not just a matter of breaking into someone`s house and photographing his papers and possessions–unless you want it to end like Watergate.” The first step was to obtain photos of the target, his or her family, whoever else lived in the house. Then the FBI virtually dissected the targets` lives: where they worked, what their working hours were, how they got to and from work, what kind of car they drove and where they normally parked. If the residence was a rented apartment, the FBI would discreetly determine the landlord`s politics; if the landlord were
”patriotic,” he might provide the bureau with a duplicate key.
After a successful dry run, the Chicago FBI office would send a veiled memo to FBI headquarters like the one proposing a break-in in early 1962 at the 189 W. Madison St. office of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, a group set up by former party member Richard Criley to counter the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee. ”The Chicago office,” the memo began, ”has recently developed an anonymous source close to CCDBR headquarters. This source presents a great potential for obtaining the personal correspondence and financial records of Richard Criley.
”The office building is locked from the inside at 10 p.m. each night, after all the tenants have departed. The building is not reopened each morning until 7 a.m., upon the arrival of the building engineer. In view of the maximum security which can be secured (sic), it is recommended that authority be granted to make contact with these sources on or about Feb. 10, 1962, sometime during the period of 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.”
Criley, a well-known party member in Chicago until he quit in 1960 over what he now says were ”some disagreements around the First Amendment,” and who has obtained that memo and others under the Freedom of Information Act, disputes the FBI`s assertion that his group was merely a party front.
”They paid more attention to me when I was out of the CP than when I was a member,” Criley says. ”They continued to report me as a member for five years or so.” FBI documents provided to Criley refer to another break-in at the CCBDR office as late as 1966 aimed at obtaining a list of the committee`s contributors.
Because of the complexity of the break-in operations, large numbers of agents were required. In the Chicago FBI office alone there were two teams of 12 agents each on what was known euphemistically as the ”infiltration squad,” a tenth of the total agent force. Only two agents from each team would actually enter homes and offices. A third drove the getaway car, and two others stood guard outside. The rest were assigned to follow the ”target”
and make sure he did not return home unexpectedly. One of the favorite choices for guard duty, Swearingen says, was an agent who had been a college boxing champion and who at least once had to ”mug” a target–he somehow had eluded the surveillance and was returning home early–to keep the man from reaching his apartment before the agents could depart.
The man probably believes to this day that he was the victim of a common thug, since the bag job agents made a point of abandoning their regulation suits and ties for cheap, nondescript clothing in hopes they would be mistaken for workmen or loiterers, anything but FBI agents. Like the other agents, Swearingen bought his `work` clothes at the Sears store on State Street, where the head of security was a former FBI agent who gave the bag job agents employee discount cards.
Like Richard Criley, many of the bureau`s break-in targets were also bugged and wiretapped, something the bag job agents found an invaluable aid.
”While watching their apartments,” Swearingen writes, ”we frequently got calls from the `hole`–the secret room at the FBI office where all bugs and wiretaps were monitored 24 hours a day, (that) told us when our ”packages”
were ready to leave and where they were headed. ”I have been on bag jobs that have gone on for as long as six hours without a break,” Swearingen adds.
”There was never room for personal discomfort. A bag job is no place for anyone who cannot control his appetite, bladder or bowels.”
To add to the strain, there was also little time to rest between break-ins. ”There were days when one team would pull two different jobs, depending upon the targets involved,” Swearingen says. ”Some targets were bagged as often as three times a day. I can recall one target which was hit in the neighborhood of 100 times a year.” That man, a vacuum cleaner salesman whom the FBI suspected of being a courier for the Communist Party, would often return home between sales calls. As soon as he departed, the hovering agents would re-enter his apartment to see whether he had left anything of interest behind.
The South Side home of another target, a woman who later became a prominent official of the Chicago Typographical Union, was broken into so often that ”it was almost like living there,” Swearingen says. ”She had a very ill mother, and we used to do bag jobs on the days she took her mother to the doctor–I think it was Thursday afternoon. It reached the point that I was going into other people`s houses more often than I was going home.”
Given the elaborate security precautions, there was something close to pandemonium in the Chicago FBI office when the bag job agents discovered that their civilian radio dispatcher, ”a very nice gal, very quiet,” had become romantically entangled with a member of the local Communist Party. The woman, one of the few people in the office who knew where the bag job squad was at all times, was passing her paramour information about the squad`s comings and goings, even the license numbers of the cars they were using.
Once the leak was discovered, Swearingen says, ”It was pretty well hushed up.” Though promptly fired, the woman was never prosecuted, sparing the FBI the embarrassment that would have attended a public trial.
”I am proud of the men I worked with and proud of our successes,”
Swearingen writes. ”What I am not proud of is that it was necessary to do these things to further the image of J. Edgar Hoover. Communism could have been fought just as successfully within the legal limits of the law and the Constitution. If the FBI had conducted its break-ins with warrants, I would not have much to say about the matter.”
For its part, the FBI has never maintained that the break-ins were legal. Indeed, William C. Sullivan, a top FBI official, acknowledged in a 1966 memo that because the black bag jobs involved trespassing, they were ”clearly illegal.” So sensitive was the practice, in fact, that even within the FBI the terms ”bag job,” ”burglary” or ”break-in” never appeared on paper. The agents who conducted the bag jobs, Swearingen says, were even instructed to falsify their work sheets to show that they were in the office at the time the entries occurred. Still, it was easy for those who knew what was going on to read between the lines of the memos that flowed back and forth between Chicago and Washington attributing the information gleaned from a break-in to ”an anonymous source close to” the target, or someone ”who has furnished reliable information in the past.”
Swearingen and the other agents on the squad had no illusions about the legality of their activities, especially after the No. 2 man in the Chicago FBI office told them ”that Hoover would fire and disown us if we ever got caught in the act.” The official, Swearingen writes, ”went on to stress how one mistake could jeopardize the hundreds of agents on bag job squads operating in large cities from New York to San Francisco. Though we`d been routinely breaking into people`s houses and offices for years, that was the first time the FBI leadership had explained what they would do with us in a tight spot.”
Among the agents, he says, the consensus was that ”we thought this was what we were supposed to be doing for Hoover and the country. What kept many of the agents from being bothered about constitutional violations was their belief that they were honestly defending the Constitution from a communist takeover.” Their principal concern, however, remained getting caught, and there were enough close calls to keep the tension running high.
More than once, the ”target” somehow slipped away from the trailing agents and returned home just as the FBI was leaving. In such cases, Swearingen recalls, the departing agents just ”said hello and walked on by.” The real fear, though, was the Chicago police: ”All of us on the bag job squad knew that the Chicago Police Department would have loved to catch Hoover`s finest in the act.”
Once, when a neighbor lady saw Swearingen and other agents going in the door of a South Side apartment, she promptly called the cops. Then she called the building manager. ”The manager was aware of what was going on, and he called the FBI office,” Swearingen recalls. ”But by the time they got the word to us on the radio, we could hear the sirens.” The agents made it to their cars and took off, but ”we almost ran into the police cars coming around the corner.” The close calls gradually took their toll: ”More than half of the bag job squad in Chicago became alcoholics,” Swearingen says.
”The others developed ulcers or had to quit because they turned into nervous wrecks.”
