The tall, broad-shouldered man in cheap work clothes was rifling papers in a desk drawer when he heard a muffled explosion outside the four-story red brick walk-up on Chicago`s South Side. He passed off the noise as a backfiring car and calmly went about his work. Then a lookout posted on the street below reported that someone had just been shot on the front steps of the building.
”I could feel my stomach wrench,” the man recalled nearly 20 years later. ”Was this the day we`d be caught? I raced to the front window but couldn`t see any activity on the street below. I relayed the news to my partner. From Charlie`s twisted expression, he looked like he was in pain.”
Then the man sprinted through the apartment`s kitchen to the back door.
”As I looked out the rear window to see if the coast was clear, I expected to hear police sirens any minute. I thought the neighbors would have come outside by now, but the neighborhood was quiet.”
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw his partner walking slowly through the kitchen with his arms around his stomach.
”What`s wrong with you?”
”It`s my ulcer.”
”Can you make it?”
”Go ahead, I`ll make it.”
His heart was pounding as he started down the metal fire escape. ”I couldn`t ever remember feeling so vulnerable. What if someone looked out and saw us–two white guys carrying bags and running down the stairs from a black man`s apartment? We jumped into the car, floored it and sped down the alley toward the University of Chicago campus. At 55th Place we turned the car east toward Lake Shore Drive and safety.”
Just another would-be burglary gone awry? Another narrow escape for a couple of hapless yeggs? Hardly. For as one of the burglars recalls in his unpublished memoirs and a recent series of interviews, the victim of this particular break-in was an organizer for a Chicago-based labor union, and the intruders two FBI agents hoping to find some shred of evidence linking his union to the Communist Party.
In his day, Special Agent M. Wesley Swearingen was no second-rate second-story man. By his own account and others, he was a hell of a good burglar who committed hundreds of illegal entries in and around Chicago without once being caught in the act. And like the other FBI agents in other cities who carried out similar break-ins until the practice was halted in the early 1970`s, Wes Swearingen expected that his clandestine career as a government break-in artist would forever remain one of the country`s best kept secrets.
He never reckoned on Watergate and its aftermath, that brief period of inquiry and reform during which many of the U.S. intelligence community`s deepest secrets were exposed to public view. Some of the revelations seemed merely amusing, like the CIA`s plan to cause Fidel Castro`s beard to fall out. (The agency plotted to coat the inside of the Cuban leader`s SCUBA mask with a hair-removing chemical.) Others, like the failed plots to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo, were more disconcerting. But Wes Swearingen was frankly shocked when, on a Sunday afternoon in 1975, a senior FBI official admitted under mounting pressure from Congress and the news media that bureau agents had conducted a relatively small number of what he called
”surreptitious entries” over the years.
The official tried his best to downplay the matter; there had only been 238 such break-ins, he said, beginning with the onset of World War II and ending when J. Edgar Hoover halted the practice in 1966. But it was not until then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley dismissed the practice as an
”infinitesimal” part of the FBI`s overall work that Wes Swearingen began to perform some mental arithmetic. The FBI was admitting to fewer than 250 break-ins altogether, but Swearingen thought that ”a more accurate figure would be 100 times that amount.” He had, after all, carried out nearly 500 himself in Chicago. ”I spent five years on the bag job squad,” he remembers thinking, ”20 percent of my career. That is not infinitesimal.”
As Swearingen`s initial anger at the FBI`s duplicity subsided, he began to recall all of the other duplicities, large ones and small, which he had known about or been involved in during his career. ”I looked at my 25-year key,” he writes, ”and I began to think over where I had gone astray. Was it cheating on the exams in training school? Padding the overtime in Chicago?
Breaking into people`s homes because Hoover was obsessed with Communism?
Developing phony informants to meet the quota? Lying in court because I knew that to do otherwise a guilty man might be set free?
”I don`t know where it started. I just knew it had to end. The only way I could ever regain my self-respect was to tell the truth–tell everything I knew about the break-ins, corruption, chicanery and perjury.”
Wes Swearingen decided to write a book.
”Bag Job,” a detailed record of his career, is not the first memoir by an FBI agent. That distinction is reserved for ”Hoover`s FBI: The Men and the Myth,” published by William Turner in 1970 to the great consternation of the bureau. There have been a handful of ”Inside the FBI” books since then, most of them on the self-serving side, but Swearingen`s is the only first-hand account so far of the FBI break-ins and the bureau`s other questionable activities that became the focus of so many congressional and Justice Department investigations in the late 1970s.
Because it is also the only account of what Swearingen claims were the FBI`s attempts to cover up the extent of its illegal activities in the face of those investigations, he is aware that his assertions will provoke some heated official denials. ”Even today,” he writes, ”many outsiders will not believe what I say. Certainly no one inside the FBI will admit to it, although there are thousands of agents who know it to be true. Some probably do not even know what I mean when I speak of integrity.”
In his book, Swearingen accuses the FBI of a wide range of official and unofficial misconduct: lying to Congress, the courts and the Justice Department itself; attempting to smear politicians and kidnaping suspected spies; covering up the arrests of wayward agents; even cheating the taxpayers with phony overtime. What lends his memoir its authenticity and historical value is Swearingen`s readiness to acknowledge having been a participant, and a willing one at that, in many of the abuses about which he writes, and his admission that for most of his career he was untroubled by the illegality and immorality of the assignments he was asked to carry out.
Although he was entrusted with the FBI`s most sensitive operations, Swearingen was never a pinstriped ”company man” in the image of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Far from it. He was one of the first FBI agents not working undercover to wear a beard (a violation of bureau regulations that somehow went overlooked), and almost certainly the first agent ever to live on a sailboat (he simply gave the FBI a post office box as an address; nobody ever checked).
For such an unconventional agent, Wesley Swearingen, now 57, had a most conventional beginning, growing up in Steubenville, Ohio, as the straitlaced son of a junior high school principal who never swore or drank alcohol and a mother who helped to found the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. For young Swearingen, as for most boys in the 1930s and early 1940s, J. Edgar Hoover and his Federal Bureau of Investigation seemed to be the very essence of modern-day men with white hats on white horses. But Swearingen also had a very special close-up view. From time to time, FBI agents investigating a case in Steubenville, where the bureau had no office, would rent rooms in his family`s house. The stories they told around the fire at night, of chasing gangsters and arresting kidnapers, were like
”Gangbusters” come to life.
No one was overly surprised when Swearingen, having graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in business administration and casting about for a career, settled on the FBI. ”I admired J. Edgar Hoover,” he writes. ”I thought he knew what he was talking about. I was still bubbling over with patriotism from my Navy service during World War II. I was sure Gen. Patton was right–we should have taken the war to Russian soil and stamped out those no-good commie bastards once and for all.”
In those early Cold War years, Swearingen must have seemed the perfect recruit. He says now that there was no way of knowing that ”the Constitution would be threatened by the very organization sworn to defend it,” that the FBI`s attitude toward law enforcement would gradually come to be typified by the bureau supervisor who once told a group of agents: ”We are the only ones who know what is good for the country, and we are the only ones who can do anything about it.”
When he drew his first assignment, to the Chicago FBI office in the summer of 1952, Swearingen`s head danced with visions of gun battles with public enemies in black shirts and white ties. But it wasn`t long before he found out that the John Dillingers had been replaced by a new public enemy, domestic Communism, which the FBI proposed to combat not with machine gun bullets but with burglar`s tools.
Swearingen and the other agents picked for the Chicago ”bag job squad” were carefully trained at the FBI`s Quantico, Va., academy, where they were taught how to pick locks, photograph documents under adverse conditions and open and reseal envelopes. When the FBI gave Swearingen his own set of lock picking tools, someone mentioned as an afterthought that their possession was illegal in Illinois.
The motive for the break-ins was not to gather evidence for prosecutions–because the agents carried no warrants, whatever evidence they found would have been inadmissible in court–but to keep tabs on the activities of ”the party” and those the FBI suspected of belonging to it. The only Communist Swearingen ever arrested was Claude Lightfoot, the chairman of the Illinois Communist Party who had gone underground to avoid prosecution under the Smith Act and whom Swearingen discovered lurking in a doorway on the South Side. (A few party leaders were convicted and jailed for violating the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. But the Supreme Court later ruled, in the Lightfoot case and others, that the law was an unconstitutional infringement on the right of free speech.)
Because of the difficulty and danger inherent in their work, the bag job squad was the cream of the crop, the elite within an elite corps. ”We were the most trusted agents in the office,” Swearingen says. ”For years, that`s all we did.”
One of Swearingen`s colleagues on the squad agrees. ”Some of these guys, that was their sole function, doing bag jobs,” he says. ”Of course, all of us, that`s what we were doing. But some of them did nothing else in their whole career.”
If Swearingen`s FBI personnel file is any indication, the bag job agents were amply rewarded, not just with letters and commendations from J. Edgar Hoover himself but with substantial salary bonuses for successful entries. In one such letter, reproduced in his book, Hoover informs Swearingen that he has been granted a $150 cash award, a tidy sum in 1955, ”in recognition of your outstanding participation in the development of a number of highly confidential sources of information relative to the internal security of the country.”
According to Swearingen, the term ”black bag job” derives from the black leather doctor`s bag in which agents carried their burglary tools in the early 1940s, when the practice of breaking-and-entering began. But the term quickly became an anachronism. By the mid-1950s, agents were using brown executive-style briefcases to transport their lock-picking tools, cameras, radios and envelope steamers. The camera setup, especially impressive for the times, was a 35 mm. Leica attached to the inside lid of a briefcase with powerful lights mounted on each side of the camera. ”All I had to do,”
Swearingen writes, ”was plug the electric cord into an outlet, place the documents inside the case under the camera and snap the shutter.” Copies of any handwritten documents found were ”sent to Hoover for inclusion in the National Security File, which contained handwriting specimens of all known
`subversives.` ”
The lock picks received less use, for actually picking a lock was always the last resort. If the key to a target`s home or office could somehow be obtained beforehand, and it usually could, the FBI would make its own key from a wax impression. In the Chicago FBI office was a wall safe where several dozen such keys hung on hooks, keys to the homes and offices of ”various Communists, religious officials, black leaders, union officials, liberal attorneys and others.”
When no key could be found in advance, the call would go out for a particular FBI agent who had ”a fascination for locks. Every time a new lock came on the market he would buy one and take it home and take it apart and figure out how to pick it. His basement was full of them.” But even this agent was stumped when the bag job squad tried to gain entry to the North Whipple Street apartment of William Sennett, the Communist Party`s
organizational secretary, who had fitted his front door with a ”mushroom lock.”
