Ex-agent gives inside view of Hoover’s FBI

Ex-agent gives inside view of Hoover’s FBI

By Christopher Sullivan

The Associated Press

The day after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, columnist Jack
Anderson wrote that the longtime FBI director had reformed "a
collection of hacks, misfits and courthouse hangers-on" into a
model investigative agency. But even this praise was tempered.

"Hoover was scrupulous at first not to step beyond the bounds of
a policeman," Anderson continued. "But I would be hypocritical not
to point out that in his failing years he sometimes stepped across
those bounds."

Hoover’s chapter in American history was undergoing revision
well before his death and this continues unabated. Scholars
investigate, as in David Garrow’s "The FBI and Martin Luther King
Jr." Biographers interpret, as in Curt Gentry’s "J. Edgar Hoover:
The Man and His Secrets."

Now comes M. Wesley Swearingen, a 25-year bureau veteran, with
an insider’s portrait of Hoover’s FBI. His story, "FBI SECRETS: An
Agent’s Expose," is just as bleak as the others in assessing the
bureau’s abuses, maybe more so because of its confessional
quality.

By the end of his career, Swearingen writes, "I had lost the
ability to distinguish between different levels of corruption."
Even serious wrongdoing, such as alleged lying to Congress or the
courts by FBI officials, "no longer shocked me … I had accepted
it as a means to survive."

Swearingen’s book is a tale of institutionalized corruption
­ from routine cheating on applicants’ tests to misuse of
funds for paying informants. It is a litany of lawbreaking, not by
those on wanted posters but by their pursuers.

One appendix, titled "Logistics of a Black Bag Job," details how
agents allegedly committed hundreds of break-ins to obtain
evidence.

A team inside a house or office would communicate with lookout
agents outside, Swearingen writes. Sometimes they used a baseball
radio code: "The players are on the field" as the burglary began;
"bottom of the ninth" when ready for pickup, and other phrases.

Bureau officials have denied large-scale use of this practice
and say reforms have been instituted since Hoover’s tenure.

The book’s most serious allegations, many of which Swearingen
has testified to in court, concern the bureau’s so-called
COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program, from the late 1950s
through the early ’70s.

This effort, targeting groups and individuals considered
subversive by Hoover and others in the FBI, went beyond merely
amassing secret files but also included illegal surveillance,
harassment and worse, historians have shown.

Swearingen, who spent time on the "racial squad" of the Los
Angeles FBI office and later processed Freedom of Information Act
requests for bureau files, focuses on FBI actions against the Black
Panther Party.

He contends the FBI withheld potential alibi information in the
trial of a Panther leader, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who was
convicted of murder.

Swearingen says wiretap logs placed Pratt in Oakland, in
Northern California, at the time of the 1968 Southern California
murders. Portions of the logs are missing. "Someone destroyed these
logs," he contends.

The FBI denies his claim, and Pratt has failed in efforts to
fight his conviction. He remains in prison.

"FBI SECRETS" has some built-in limitations. It uses fictitious
names for some individuals whose alleged wrongdoing he describes,
and it presents only one side of the FBI story during his years
there.

In a telephone interview, Swearingen said he might have seen the
bureau in a different light if he had avoided COINTELPRO, as many
agents did.

"I could have had a career fighting crime," he said. "Probably
half of the agents in the FBI don’t know what I’m talking about …
because they were really in a different organization."

BOOK: "FBI SECRETS: An Agent’s Expose." South End Press,
$30.