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Thursday, Sep 21, 2000 8:00 AM UTC

How the New York Times helped railroad Wen Ho Lee

Its reporters relied on slim evidence, quick conclusions and loyalty to sources with an ax to grind. Too bad the paper of record learned nothing from its role in Whitewater.

By

Don and Jean Marshall sat down to dinner with their son the night of March 8, 1999, when the phone rang. Their caller I.D. indicated the person on the other end was from the New York Times. “We just laughed and thought they were trying to sell us a subscription,” recalls Don Marshall, who works at the nuclear science laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. “If it was a reporter they’d want to talk to a lab manager, not a lowly staff worker like me. I didn’t even pick up the phone.”

After dinner Don and his wife, who also works at Los Alamos, headed back to work. As they turned their car around and were about to head up the hill past the house of their good friend and neighbor of 20 years, Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, they noticed, as if out of a movie, a man suddenly appear from the shadows. It was James Risen, the reporter from the New York Times. He wanted to know if they’d heard that Lee had been accused of spying for the Chinese. They talked for a while on the front lawn. “It’s one of those images that’s burned in my memory,” says Jean.

Stunned, the Marshalls drove to the lab, where they surfed the Web in search of news articles and found the New York Times’ March 6, Page 1 piece. It was coauthored by Jeff Gerth and Risen, and it had exploded like a grenade inside Washington: “Breach at Los Alamos: A Special Report: China Stole Nuclear Secrets For Bombs, U.S. Aides Say.” Although it did not name Lee (that came two days later), the 4,000-word story made it clear he was the prime suspect in what the paper was calling a historic bout of Communist espionage, and one that the Clinton administration had dragged its feet on uncovering.

Out in northern New Mexico the Marshalls were not aware that the Sunday political talk shows had been awash in talk of Chinese spies. Republican Sens. Trent Lott, John McCain and Richard Shelby were among those making the rounds, calling for investigations into an alleged White House spy coverup. On “Meet the Press,” Shelby described the reported Los Alamos breach as “probably the worst leak we’ve had in many, many years.”

The Marshalls also didn’t know that on that Sunday, frantic FBI investigators, unhappy the story had been printed and feeling intense pressure from Washington headquarters, had interrogated Lee at the lab. In a grueling session conducted without an attorney present, the agents urged Lee to confess to passing classified military secrets to the Chinese during his trip to Beijing in 1988. But according to FBI transcripts, Lee, 59, in his halting English, insisted he was innocent. “I believe [God] will make the final judgment for my case. And I depend on him.”

“You know what?” shot back the agent. “The Rosenbergs professed their innocence. They weren’t concerned either. The Rosenbergs are dead. They electrocuted them,” he said, referring to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of leaking Los Alamos secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

The agents used an important prop to dramatize to Lee his dire situation: a copy of the Times’ March 6 article.

“This is a big problem,” stressed the FBI investigator. “I think you need to read this article, because there’s some things that have been raised by Washington that we have got to get resolved.”

The agent continued, “You know, Wen Ho, this, it’s bad. I mean look at this newspaper article! I mean, ‘China Stole Secrets For Bombs.’ It all but says your name in here. Pretty soon you’re going to have reporters knocking on your door. They’re going to be knocking on the door of your friends. They’re going to find your son at [college]. And they are going to say, ‘You know your father is a spy?’”

Later in the interrogation, a bewildered Lee responded, “That reporter or whoever [in] the media [can] say that. I’m innocent, but I don’t know what can I do. I’m, I’m, I’m, I tell you how I feel, I feel, how you call that? Hopeless, OK.”

When Don Marshall returned Monday night to his home in White Rock, N.M, he dialed the phone number that the Times reporter had left behind. “I spoke my conviction,” says Marshall. “I told him they had the wrong man. He didn’t want to believe it of course. He didn’t comment, but he probably thought, ‘Ah-ha, Wen Ho really pulled the wool over your eyes.’”

Eighteen months after the original blockbuster exposi ran, editors at the New York Times may be wishing somebody at the paper had listened to Marshall, and to others who raised red flags about the paper’s early Wen Ho Lee coverage.

Because instead of accepting congratulations for breaking the biggest spy story in a decade, editors are battling what one Timesman calls “a brewing storm” inside the paper of record.

Wen Ho Lee was charged in December with 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets and denied bail. He spent most of this year in solitary confinement. When the most recent bail hearing began in August, the government’s case crumbled. The most damaging revelation came from the FBI’s lead agent, Robert Messemer, who was forced to recant crucial testimony he’d given in December, when he charged that Lee had lied to investigators and colleagues.

By early this month, government prosecutors, who once claimed Lee had downloaded the “crown jewels” of the nuclear defense system, agreed to free Lee if he pleaded guilty to one count of improperly downloading classified material.

On Sept. 13, after the U.S. District Court judge lit into top government officials who had “embarrassed our entire nation” in their handling of the case, Lee was free.

The stunning public turnaround suddenly drew attention to the fact that the entire premise of the New York Times’ early news reports and strident editorials — proclaiming that a Chinese-American scientist inside Los Alamos had given away nuclear secrets that had dramatically helped China improve its arsenal, and that the Clinton administration could have stopped it but chose not to — had turned out to be flat wrong.

To date, the paper has been strangely silent about its pivotal role in the Lee saga. Attempts to get comments from executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, managing editor Bill Keller, editorial page editor Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief Michael Oreskes and reporter Jeff Gerth, among others, were unsuccessful.

A newspaper spokesperson hinted to Salon that the paper may yet address the controversy: “Our next assessment or explanation of the Wen Ho Lee case will be addressed to our readers, not other publications.”

Times watchers predict that an extended editor’s note addressing the paper’s coverage will run in the “Week in Review” section Sunday, and that it will argue the Times was merely being aggressive in following a criminal investigation.

Many outside the paper, however, are not waiting for its official explanation.

“They rushed into this,” suggests Steve Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “This story was given to them and nobody else and they decided to run it without thinking through what they were doing. They created the illusion of something that just wasn’t there and ignored the other evidence that painted a different picture.”

“It starts out with allegations, none of which turn out to be true,” notes Walter Pincus, who has covered the Lee story for the Washington Post.

“Obviously they should be embarrassed,” says Robert Vrooman, retired Los Alamos counterintelligence chief. “Gerth and Risen were in over their heads and they got snookered.”

“It looks like a terrible injustice was done to a guy and his name first surfaced in the New York Times,” notes Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” which aired an interview with Lee last year. “I’ll leave it to the New York Times as to what they should do about it.”

Off the record, journalists at other major media outlets are teeing off on the Times, labeling its performance “utterly reckless,” suggesting the paper “fell for sources that any other reporter would have said are not playing with a full deck.”

The unusually loud drumbeat of fault finding is so steady even the White House feels comfortable publicly chastising the Times. Administration spokesman Jake Siewert told Salon, “The paper singled out Wen Ho Lee as the primary suspect and now it seems to have developed collective amnesia about its earlier reporting and editorializing.”

While the paper’s performance raises troubling questions (to borrow a favorite Times phrase when it questions the motivations and actions of others), some see an even more perplexing trend in the work of Gerth, the influential reporter who drove the original Wen Ho Lee coverage. Gerth also broke the Loral satellite transfer story two years ago (which in retrospect seems badly inflated), as well as the Whitewater allegations in 1992. That was back before Whitewater blossomed into a megastory, but instead centered around allegations of shady Clinton investments and the couple’s alleged attempts to stymie federal regulators.

But on Wednesday, independent counsel Robert Ray decided to finally shut down the six-year Whitewater investigation without bringing any charges against the Clintons. And when his predecessor, Kenneth Starr, filed his final report on the Clinton probe, he included nothing on Whitewater. Thus, those early allegations in Gerth’s stories turned out to be specious and unfounded, accusations that the government spent $52 million — and the press untold hours — chasing. (“Don’t even mention Whitewater,” sighs Pincus at the Post.)

For those who connect the dots between the three major Gerth stories, there’s an unmistakable sense of dij` vu. Each contains ominous conclusions drawn from questionable evidence, lots of loaded language, loyalty to flawed sources with axes to grind, cheerleading from the editorial page and, most importantly, central accusations that simply never pan out. To some, the Wen Ho Lee saga reads an awful lot like Whitewater.

“If you look at Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee there is a very disturbing pattern of not checking sources in terms of credibility and alleging wrongdoing when none exists,” says Dave Leavy, who served as spokesman for the National Security Council from 1998 until earlier this year, and who responded on behalf of the government to press inquiries into Lee’s case. “Lives and reputations are destroyed.”

“It’s clear the Times didn’t learn a single thing from Whitewater,” adds Gene Lyons, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist and longtime critic of Gerth’s Whitewater reporting. In his 1996 book, “Fools For Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater,” Lyons detailed how much of Gerth’s reporting was “provably false.”

For example: In 1992, Gerth wrote about Beverly Bassett Schaffer, an Arkansas bank regulator appointed by then-Gov. Clinton and portrayed in the Times as a political crony who went easy on the Clinton-affiliated Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In his very first Whitewater article, Gerth told readers Schaffer “did not remember the federal examination of Madison.” In truth, after reviewing her Madison file, Schaffer had faxed Gerth 20 pages of notes before he wrote his damning story. “There ought to be consequences when reporters screw up this badly,” says Lyons.

So the question remains: Could the Wen Ho Lee fiasco have been averted if editors at the Times had cast a critical eye on its Whitewater coverage years ago instead of encouraging Gerth’s often questionable brand of reporting?

“What happens the next time Gerth shows up with a long, impenetrable story that doesn’t add up?” asks New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, who for the past year has been critical of the Times’ China spy coverage.

Though Times editors were not available to answer that question, a Nexis database search shows that Gerth has had exactly five bylines in 2000. Earlier, Gerth had been writing approximately 40 stories each year. “He’s been conspicuously silent,” notes Steve Aftergood, senior analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. According to a Times spokesperson, Gerth has not taken a leave from the paper this year.

A Timesman for 23 years and one who has studiously avoided the TV talk show circuit, Gerth has been heralded as the paper’s top investigative reporter. That image was reinforced when he won his first Pulitzer Prize last year for leading the paper’s reporting on the alleged transfer of satellite technology to China by U.S. defense contractors Loral Space & Communications and Hughes Electronics Corp.

The guts of the story were that after a Chinese rocket carrying a Loral satellite exploded and crashed on Feb. 14, 1996, Loral engineers delivered a report on the mishap but may have given the Chinese too much sensitive information in the process. Those charges are still to be considered by a Washington grand jury.

But Gerth went further. His stories also implied that a crucial White House waiver needed by Loral to launch satellites in China may have been granted simply because Loral chairman Bernard Schwartz was a longtime contributor to the Democratic Party. Once granted that waiver, Gerth asserted, Loral leaked military secrets to the People’s Republic of China.

Thanks to Gerth’s stories, along with the paper’s urgent unsigned editorials (“There is too much evidence of wrongdoing to be suppressed or ignored,” read one) and repeated, over-the-top doomsday columns by longtime Gerth supporter William Safire (who accused Loral of “the sellout of American security”), the Department of Justice launched an investigation of Schwartz and his company, partly to quell the cries of Republican protests.

On May 23, the Los Angeles Times reported that just months after looking into the matter in 1998, Justice Department investigators became convinced the Loral chairman had done nothing wrong. A task force led by Charles Labella had been unable to turn up “a scintilla of evidence — or information — that the president was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz.” One federal investigator told the paper, “Poor Bernie Schwartz got a bad deal. There never was a whiff of a scent of a case against him.”

Seventeen days later, on Page 24, the New York Times reported that Schwartz had been cleared. Gerth did not write that story.

So of the three-legged Chinese espionage story Gerth built over the past two years — transferred satellite technology, Democratic contributor Bernie Schwartz and Wen Ho Lee — two of the legs have been kicked out from underneath him and the paper.

“If you go back three or four years ago to the San Jose Mercury News series [on the CIA and cocaine dealing], I wrote about what an overblown bullshit story it was,” says Pincus at the Washington Post. The Mercury News was widely discredited as a result of that series. “I think the series on communication satellites was of the same nature.”

Nonetheless, Gerth won a Pulitzer last year for his stories on Loral. Yet there is a widespread feeling in Washington journalism circles that even though he officially won the prize for his satellite technology reporting, it was his initial March 6 story on Los Alamos, and the buzz it instantly created, that landed him the award. (There’s also speculation that Safire lobbied the Pulitzer committee on Gerth’s behalf, waving around the reporter’s Wen Ho Lee story. Safire could not be reached for comment.)

The Pulitzer committee itself seemed slightly unsure of why it was honoring Gerth. In its official release, the organization singled out Gerth “for a series of articles that disclosed the corporate sales of American technology to China, with U.S. government approval despite national security risks.” (The Times used that language verbatim in its own news account of the award.) Actually Gerth and the Times accused Loral, after landing its waiver, of giving technology to China free of charge and without U.S. government approval.

The Loral stories resulted in something besides a Pulitzer: the creation of the Cox Committee, named after Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif. Cox was chosen by then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to investigate Chinese espionage in hopes of embarrassing the Clinton administration.

Since its release one year ago, the 900-page Cox Report has been widely ridiculed for being long on conspiracy theory and short on facts. An independent analysis done by a research team at Stanford University’s Center for International Security concluded, “There is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology.” The Times has never reported on Stanford’s findings.

It was all very reminiscent of Whitewater, where an independent counsel was named to investigate the Clintons based almost entirely on the reporting of Gerth and the New York Times. And as with independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the Whitewater investigation, Gerth enjoyed friendly Republican sources inside the Cox probe.

It’s likely these sources tipped Gerth off to Notra Trulock, the renegade Department of Energy investigator who had been waging something of a one-man war against Lee and his supposed spy ring. In 1996, Trulock resurrected concern over China’s alleged 1988 theft of an advanced warhead design named the W-88, which was developed at Los Alamos. Trulock singled out Lee for suspicion, since he was the only Los Alamos scientist who traveled to China in the ’80s.

With his warnings dismissed by the CIA, which reasoned China obtained the W-88 data elsewhere, Trulock was welcomed with open arms by the Cox Committee staffers. And by the New York Times.

“There was a lot of gasoline on the floor and they lit a match,” says Vrooman, referring to certain Republicans, Trulock and the New York Times during the political upheaval of early 1999. “The GOP lost [Monica] Lewinsky as an issue and impeachment. Now they were looking at the Chinese fundraising scandal and here comes Notra with this great story.”

One former Washington bureau chief at a major daily newspaper recalls the sense of hysteria the March 6, 1999, Times story, along with Republican cries, created in the capital. “I got to Washington in the aftermath of the McCarthy era and I haven’t seen anything that matches what’s gone on during the last year with China.”

While Gerth and his partner, Risen, never identified Trulock as their source for their story, close readers of their articles could, if they assumed the Times reporters were following an old journalism rule of thumb: Always make your sources look good. Here’s what Gerth and Risen wrote March 6: “In personal terms, the handling of this case is very much the story of the Energy Department intelligence official who first raised questions about the Los Alamos case, Notra Trulock.”

Illustrating the influence of the Times, “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert quickly did his best to turn Trulock into a hero, too, inviting him to appear on his May 23, 1999, show. There, Russert gave Trulock an open forum to spin his conspiracy theories about widespread Chinese espionage at the labs and the Clinton coverup. “I think the potential is on a magnitude equal to the Rosenbergs-Fuchs compromise of the Manhattan Project information,” Trulock told Russert.

At the end of the interview Russert turned to his other guest, Cox, and wondered gravely, “Would the country have ever heard of the magnitude of this issue without the work and efforts of Notra Trulock?”

But critics suggest Trulock is prisoner of his own agenda. “He takes a grain of truth and distorts the hell out of it,” says Vrooman, who worked with Trulock at Los Alamos for many years.

At Lee’s recent bail hearing, attorneys introduced an affidavit from Charles E. Washington, who worked for Trulock as acting director of counterintelligence and is now a senior policy analyst at the Energy Department. Washington, who is black and who told the Los Angeles Times he was once spat on by Trulock, testified that Trulock “acts vindictively and opportunistically, that he improperly uses security issues to punish and discredit others and that he has racist views toward minority groups.”

Fed up with Trulock’s increasingly outlandish accusations, Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator and chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, struck back. In a scathing letter to Trulock last year, Rudman wrote that he had “misread professional disagreements as personal affronts,” and had twisted an obligation to be straightforward into “a license for calumny.” This summer the FBI began investigating whether Trulock had disclosed classified information about the government’s spy case when he tried to sell a magazine article.

In other words, Trulock, a contributor to the rabidly anti-Clinton chat site Free Republic, was hardly the most reliable source of information. Then again, neither were the Clintons’ former business partner and congenital liar Jim McDougal or convicted felon and Arkansas con man David Hale. But Gerth and the Times relied on them both during their lengthy and influential Whitewater investigation. (Once Gerth even called an FBI agent on behalf of Hale, to let the him know Hale felt he was being silenced by Clinton-friendly prosecutors in Little Rock.)

Despite the now-obvious flaws in the Times’ March 6 story on Los Alamos, at the time it made believers out of most readers. “I assumed maybe I had been overly critical of the Times,” recalls Steven Aftergood, a senior analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “Because now they had nailed the story down and here’s the guy I figured they found transferring codes to China.”

As he began to read the paper’s steady stream of follow-up reports though, Aftergood’s fear of widespread Chinese espionage quickly faded. “The coverage was so breathless in its speculation that China was now a nuclear power thanks to U.S. espionage. That was objectively false.”

The Times told its readers as much on Sept. 7, 1999, in the form of a 5,000-word, Page 1 piece by science writer William Broad. The story seriously questioned, in a gentlemanly way, much of Gerth’s and Risen’s reporting. “It was what we call ‘The Retraction,’” says Henry Tang of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group that believes Lee was singled out because of his ethnicity.

Ever since the Broad article appeared one year ago, the Times has covered the Lee story with an even hand. Risen and Gerth no longer write about the case. “I give the Times a lot of credit” for its subsequent Lee coverage, says former National Security Council spokesman Leavy. “They let another reporter with fresh eyes really challenge the conclusions of Gerth and Risen.”

With Broad’s story, observers might have concluded the Times was backing away from Gerth’s and Risen’s earlier reports. But instead of acknowledging its errors, the Times seemed to go into a bunker. In its November 1999 issue, Brill’s Content ran a critical piece examining the newspaper’s initial reporting on Lee. Times investigative editor Stephen Engelberg (who teamed up with Gerth to write Whitewater stories in the early ’90s) promptly responded with a 2,500-word letter to the editor, adamantly denying Broad’s piece was in any way a retraction. By protesting so loudly, the Times was once again seen as defending its original, and now widely ridiculed, Wen Ho Lee stories.

But finally the Lee case, already seen by many observers as weak, collapsed in spectacular fashion inside an Albuquerque, N.M., courtroom this month, leading to the obvious question: How did this all happen?

So far, the Times has refused to openly concede its role in the saga. That has made for some peculiar reading, as when concerned, unsigned editorials began calling this month for an independent body to determine whether Wen Ho Lee was fingered by investigators simply because he was Chinese-American. Compare that to the spring of 1999, when the Times editorial page had no such reservations as it lustily cheered the paper’s investigative reporting. “The United States might as well have dumped its most sensitive defense secrets on Pennsylvania Avenue for Chinese spies to pick up,” fulminated a May 16 editorial.

The Times’ selective memory was on further display in Gail Collins’ Aug. 29 column belittling the Lee prosecution, suggesting the case was “brought to you courtesy of the FBI and the Department of Energy.” Collins delicately overlooked the Times’ own glaring role in the rush to judge Wen Ho Lee. Reached at the paper, Collins declined to comment. Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who has also written critically of the Lee prosecution without mentioning the paper, also declined to comment, other than to agree that the Times’ involvement in the Lee case “is a very good subject for exploration.”

So far the Times disagrees. Despite the uproar over the unjust treatment of Lee, the Times has not published a single editorial, op-ed column or letter to the editor about the paper’s Lee coverage.

“There’s nothing wrong with making an error, we all make mistakes,” says Aftergood. “What’s scary is the paper’s unwillingness to admit fault. I think the Times is doing a real disservice to its own interest. But it seems they’ve dug in so deep they can’t get out.”

At the height of the Lee story last year, Vrooman recalls receiving a request from the Times, asking for a photograph of himself. “I asked them what for and they said, ‘You’re a part of the story.’ I said, ‘Well, so are you.’” He half-jokingly suggested the paper run photographs of Gerth in its news reports about Lee.

Says Vrooman, “Nobody is going to write a history of this case without mentioning the New York Times.”

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush." More Eric Boehlert.

Friday, May 18, 2012 5:38 PM UTC

Who gets to be an FBI threat?

A recent Rolling Stone article raises troubling questions about FBI entrapment schemes and their targets

By The five men arrested on April 30 for plotting to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio. (Credit: AP/FBI)

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting — planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:

Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.

Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

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Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com More Natasha Lennard.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 6:49 PM UTC

FBI heroically locks up ridiculous anarchists on May Day

Feds stop inept radicals from carrying out a plot feds helped them conceive and carry out

By U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan)

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Monday, Mar 26, 2012 12:00 PM UTC

U.S. intelligence unmasked

The author of a new FBI book talks about what being a spy is really like and ways to balance liberty and security

By , The Browser
This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen and Ian McEwan. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out The Browser or follow @TheBrowser on Twitter

The job of the intelligence services is to understand others and help leaders act more wisely, says Tim Weiner, the author of a new history of the FBI. There’s also, he tells us, a balance to be struck between liberty and security.

The BrowserYou have spent decades studying the inner workings of America’s intelligence system, and the past few years looking at newly released files from the FBI. What will we learn by reading your new history of the FBI, “Enemies”?

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?

I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.

America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.

I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.

Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.

So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.

In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?

Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.

That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.

Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.

Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.

Tell us more about this book.

Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.

Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.

What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.

Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?

In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.

Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.

In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.

Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.

Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.

Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.

If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.

Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.

“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?

“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.

Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.

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More Eve Gerber.

Monday, Nov 14, 2011 6:00 PM UTC

The love J. Edgar Hoover does not deserve

Clint Eastwood's kindly biopic of the FBI director skims over the vicious racist

By Leonardo DiCaprio in "J. Edgar"

Historic verisimilitude has never been Hollywood’s top priority, and its latest blockbuster, “J. Edgar,” is no exception.

Director Clint Eastwood, who often played the part of a lawman on the big screen, is now serving up what amounts to a brief for the defense of the FBI’s legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio).  In the process, Eastwood distorts the historical record, omitting  facts about Hoover’s ruthless abuse of power, and even sanitizing the infamous cross-dressing rumors involving America’s top cop.

The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism:  Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.

Fair enough.

But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue.  Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion.   Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove.  A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.

Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers.  Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.

The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity.  But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness.   In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.

What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate?  That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”  The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”

Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished.  Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those  of King’s associates;  to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same.  Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.

Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.”  But they didn’t.  Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media.  Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him.  (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification.  Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life.  This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.”  (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.”  Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)

And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen?  In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress.  The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.

In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.

Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail.  But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.

Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt.  Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical.  However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.

To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies.  But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.

Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.

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Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton Professor of Journalism at the University of Maryland, is the author of Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture, just released in paperback. More Mark Feldstein.

Wednesday, Nov 9, 2011 1:00 AM UTC

“J. Edgar”: Clint Eastwood’s lame and insulting Hoover biopic

Leonardo DiCaprio mumbles through this tepid, soft-focus saga of America's closeted secret policeman

By Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover in "J. Edgar"

We gather today to pay tribute to two genuine American icons, but without saying anything nice about either of them. Clint Eastwood has made a movie — or at least I think that’s what it is; the lighting is often so dim it’s difficult to make out — about longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who acted as the wacko third rail of American law enforcement for almost half a century. “J. Edgar” is one of those prestige Hollywood pictures that sounds, at first, as if it might be a good idea: a name director, a supposedly big star playing a major historical figure, and a script by young screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who since “Milk” has become the go-to scribe for what is no doubt described in story meetings as “gay material.” But instead of a good idea, “J. Edgar” turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody’s ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history’s most controversial figures.

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.

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Andrew O

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