Washington Confidential 33 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 33Part 2 · WIRETAPPERS, SNOOPS AND SPIES
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 33
Part 2 · WIRETAPPERS, SNOOPS AND SPIES
MortimerEnglish
After you’ve exchanged conversation with a number of Washingtonians, you wonder what made them decidedly different from others. Then it dawns on you. They are whisperers.
They all seem consciously afraid that they may be overheard. That marks them even in casual conversations, and when they utter secrets they are theatrically overcautious. These are acquired habits, not without foundation. All mankind has a common weakness for spreading gossip. Most people can retail only minutiae. But in Washington, matters that may rock the world are entrusted, or pass through the hands of, those who otherwise would have little to tell beyond back-fence piddle. Furthermore, for one to say his wires are tapped is a mark of self importance.
The capital is overrun by snoops and spies, not only using every cloak-and-dagger device for foreign transmission, but assigned and trained to catch and report inter-bureau information, rumors included.
An observation at a dinner table by a member of Congress or an executive may cause an uproar in Moscow, London or Calcutta. Or it may bring a midnight huddle in a cabinet department or the President’s sound-proofed den.
You meet almost no one of any importance who converses at ease. The thinnest statement or flattest opinion can be amplified and multiplied. If it escapes an official listening post, it may reach a columnist, which is worse.
There has been considerable furor on the subject of Washington wiretapping.
That is a topic which every seasoned editor has learned to recognize as having extraordinary human interest appeal. The phone is such a common, yet tricky instrument, that kitchenmaids who have affairs with delivery boys shiver with horrible fears that their big secrets are being tapped. And this is not confined to small people. In Washington such suspicions are justified.
Many mentally connect wiretapping with the F.B.I. The two have been joined in recurrent publicity. Deliberate left-wing propaganda has exaggerated and exploited the notion. The F.B.I. uses this method, as does any other efficient police force. But emphasis thereon is disproportionate. The practice is widespread with only a modicum of use in criminal investigation. The F.B.I. itself makes a daily check against cut-ins on its own wires, including J. Edgar Hoover’s own private lines. He and his bureau are Enemy No. 1 to the Reds and all their sycophants and sympathizers, the only man in the country who called the shots on the Communist situation since the beginning. And as the eyes and ears of the Department of Justice, the G-men handle dynamite affecting interests from car thieves to disloyal U.S. employes to chairmen of the boards of trusts.
Tapping F.B.I. wires is not a profitable career. The bureau knows all the tricks. New electronic developments now make it possible to intrude on some communications without physical contact with the wire. No instruments can detect such espionage. This is a hazard beyond mechanical defense.
We said everyone in Washington lives in constant fear and dread of being overheard, even if the subject matter is of importance to no one. It becomes habit. Congressmen and officials are cagey when they talk on the phone, though after a few minutes of cryptic conversation they forget and loosen up. When you visit the average office holder in his sanctum he steers you away from the walls, then speaks in an undertone. In your hotel room his eyes wander around the walls, searching for “bugs” which can pick up and record every sound.
Wiretapping is a merry indoor sport in Washington, engaged in by dozens of agencies--public and private.
When the White House wants to know what’s going on it employs Secret Service experts. They ferret out information about the President’s political enemies, inside and outside the government. It is filed away for future reference to be used for retaliation or guidance. Some Democratic Senators and Congressmen use Congressional committee wiretappers. Investigators get the dope on political enemies in Washington and back home. Administration leaders tried desperately to “get” Senator McCarthy and no method was beneath them. Minority party members, deprived of the services of official wiretappers, hire private detective agencies. Kefauver complained his committee’s wires were being tapped.
Many cabinet officers and other high officials usually have their own intelligence services for spying on associates, the opposition, Hoover, and even on the President himself.
Foremost among these administrative intelligence sections are those of the Department of State, Treasury, Defense, and the Post Office, with its sureshot inspectors.
Oscar Chapman, Secretary of the Interior, has a fine intelligence, headed by Mike Reilly, former chief of the White House Secret Service.
The political cross currents are such that at any time five or six sets of wiretappers, each unaware of what the other is doing, may be listening in on a subject’s wires; while the subject may have his own dicks listening in on the principals whose agents are cutting in on his conversation.
Like lobbying, wiretapping is an insidious system used by everyone, acknowledged by no one, so Congress shrinks from delving deeply into it.
Communists recently forced the issue into the open, as they did with lobbying, both of which they use extravagantly. The Senate came up with a weak-kneed investigation of wiretapping. Senator Claude “Red” Pepper, of Florida, already a lame duck, was appointed to head the committee. Pepper tried to slant the hearings to make it appear the only wiretappers in Washington were Republican leaders. He named Senator Owen Brewster of Maine as the goat. About all the investigation brought out was that the Metropolitan Police Force is a chief offender.
Police Lieutenant Joseph W. Shimon, the cops’ expert, admitted he did some outside work on these lines for private clients and for Congressional committees. Senator Brewster said he paid Shimon’s expenses to investigate a man who, Brewster thought, was “shadowing” him. It turned out also that Shimon was paid to tap Howard Hughes’ wires when that eccentric nabob was probed in connection with his wartime airplane contracts.
After the Senate committee spent a lot of time and money investigating wiretapping, its counsel, Gerhard Van Arkel, who also wants to be District Commissioner, made a brilliant discovery. He said the group already had proved its chief point, namely, “There is a good deal of wiretapping going on in Washington and it is difficult to act against the practice under present law.”
Foreign government operatives compile volumes on the words of our officials, as well as from embassies and snoopers of other foreign countries. Wiretappers do not expect to garner much direct information, but they winnow a thousand talks for one bit that will compromise the object of the tap and make him vulnerable to power pressure.
Lobbyists and labor unions get the goods on people they need. And government wiretappers often listen in on them.
Add to all this private intrigue, suspicious husbands and wives, and you have an industry.
Because Washington is federal property, its telephone setup is governed by the Federal Communications Commission. FCC rules forbid unauthorized listening in on phone calls. U.S. law makes it a crime to divulge such information. Evidence secured by wiretapping may not be used in federal courts. Supreme Court Justice Holmes decreed it “a dirty business.” The strict rules hamper legitimate law enforcement officers, but do not hinder those snooping secrets for blackmail or political pressure.
In many other states, New York especially, any evidence, obtained legally or illegally, is admissible in court, though the detective who breaks the law to land it may be prosecuted, but never is. He’s decorated, instead.
New York law is liberal in extending the right to local peace officers to tap wires by judicial sanction, ex parte, for specific inquiries, never refused. Federal agents working on cases in New York and other such states usually tie up with local cops and prosecute in local courts, because the Feds are restrained in their own. In the District there is no local law, so the authorities are handcuffed.
Wiretapping is rarely used to procure actual evidence. Judges and juries don’t like it. But eavesdropping alerts officers and then they go after collateral evidence and don’t reveal where the tipoff originated.
Instead of developing more stringent legislation which is what the Communists, who break every law, want, the radical-sponsored Pepper investigation failed so miserably that many Congressmen agreed the government should have more power to protect itself by means of wiretapping. The Department of Justice is sponsoring a bill to permit, under some circumstances, the use of evidence in court so obtained; to be accepted after a Federal Judge issues an order on application of government intelligence agencies, and to sanction such agencies to engage in wiretapping directly, not for court evidence, subject to approval by the Attorney General.
Many sober observers feel that to forbid the F.B.I. any reasonable means for counteracting treason and espionage is childish prudery, and that its bitter opponents are not in good faith.
You hear a lot from pinks and phony progressives that the nation’s capital is a police state where no man is free to utter his thoughts. But most of the spying is done not for legitimate government sources, but is privately sponsored by politicians, office-holders or subversive and inimical interests. Washington is no OGPU camp. Most of the work done in the headquarters of federal investigative agencies is administrative. They decentralize their field work. The Washington offices of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Alcoholic Tax Unit and several others are branches of the Baltimore division and report to the superintendent there.
The Washington field office of the F.B.I. is as remote and as independent from the director as, for instance, the ones in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and like them is run by an agent-in-charge, through regular channels like out-of-town offices, via Clyde A. Tolson, the skillful associate director, and brainy assistant directors Mickey Ladd, Hugh Clegg, Lou Nichols, Dick Glavin, Rolf Harbo, Al Rosen and Stan Tracy before Hoover handles any matter.
The agent-in-charge of the Washington field office has as much authority and autonomy and is as locally independent as Ed Scheidt and his assistant, Bill Whelan, in New York; George McSwain in Chicago, and Dick Hood in L.A., all solid and seasoned chiefs of ability, integrity and patriotism.
The same lefties who are moaning about Washington being a police state recently tried to slip a fast one over, to make it so, and at the expense of embarrassing and possibly destroying the F.B.I.
When the House Committee Investigating Crime and Law Enforcement in the District was drawing up its report, certain sources tried to sneak a sleeper into it, recommending that the F.B.I. be given final responsibility for policing the city of Washington.
We have determined that the suggestion was made to sub-committee Chairman Davis by District Attorney Fay who said he concurred in it with Peyton Ford, an Assistant Attorney General, with a long record of sympathy for “progressive” causes. Informed observers wonder if Ford, who helped whitewash Amerasia, was acting for higher-ups out to “get” J. Edgar Hoover.
The plan was to slip this through into legislation. That would mean the end of the F.B.I. as we know it. It would then become a city police force. Its organization would be disrupted, as was the Treasury during Prohibition. It would have to take on thousands of new agents, waste time with drunks, whores, policy-slip peddlers and punks, and meanwhile it would have to take the odium for the conditions portrayed in this book, which go deeper than mere failure of police.
In recent years it has become the fashion in the movie industry to produce whodunit pictures about detective agencies of the Federal government. The Hollywood geniuses think they have covered all but they missed plenty.
(Note: In all cases their duties are regulated and catalogued by statute. None, including the F.B.I., is a genuine and general secret police force--such as Scotland Yard.
Generally speaking, their powers and duties are in one of four categories.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation “investigates.”
The Postal Inspectors “inspect.”
The Treasury Agents “enforce.”
The Secret Service “protects”--the President and the currency.)
The Narcotics Bureau is covered elsewhere in some detail; but this is as good a place as any to assure you that Federal cops are human beings, not machines assembled to turn out convictions. A principal function of the Narcotics Bureau is to combat the dope evil, not to imprison its victims. This was demonstrated when a famed Hollywood movie star went on the junk. The Bureau, in checking prescriptions, found she was in the hands of a quack who was ruining her life. Commissioner Anslinger made a trip to Hollywood to plead with the head of her studio to give her a year off, so she could go to a sanitarium for a cure. She had two pictures in the works and the studio factotum demurred. He mentioned her contract, said the company had millions invested in the films. He “couldn’t possibly see my way clear.”
Anslinger warned him she would collapse and the company would lose an asset worth even more. The young woman was being kept alive during the day on benzedrine. Afternoons the doctor tapered her off on secanol. After work she was dosed with morphine. The inevitable eventuated. She blew up completely, tried suicide, was hospitalized and suspended. Then the government stepped in and gave her the cure. Now she is dehabituated and rehabilitated.
The Intelligence Unit uncovered the huge tax fraud that sent Henry Lustig, former owner of New York’s Longchamps Restaurant chain, to the pen. Many stories are told on how the prosecution began, including the apocryphal one that Henry Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, was forced to stand in line and wait for a table in a Miami cafe when Lustig was ushered in ahead of him; Morgenthau asked who the man was, exploded and ordered the Feds to get him.
But the real story is this: The New York hideaway office of the unit is at 253 Broadway. There’s a Longchamps Restaurant in the basement. Federal agents don’t earn enough to afford its fancy prices. They usually lunch in a counter-joint around the corner. But one day it rained. Some agents were tied up on a big case, didn’t have time to wait, so they ducked down in the elevator.
Many Wall Street financiers lunch there regularly, have tables reserved and waiting. The only empty one had a “reserved” sign, but the Intelligence boys grabbed it over the protest of the hostess. When the millionaires arrived they had to wait. They fumed. Lustig was there. He shouted, “Why did you let those bums take that table?”
Service to the “bums” was cut off. They wondered whether the imperious Lustig’s returns were clean, whether he wasn’t the sort of individualist who would probably steal. They checked. He had sequestered $5,000,000 in unreported hatcheck money.
When the Intelligence Unit, nicknamed “The U-Boats,” sent Atlantic City boss Nocky Johnson to the can, they got him by counting the towels sent to the laundry by the local cat-houses. This established the intake of the madames, and their kickbacks upstairs.
The Intelligence Unit has been working on the hidden holdings of the Mafia for years. When evidence in hand is collated, 30 of the most important hoodlums will trade in their tailor-mades for prison denim. There’s terrific pressure from higher-ups to stop the forthcoming prosecution. Only orders from the President or Attorney General will do it.
Sometimes Intelligence runs into amusing situations like the case of the rich Chinese and the blonde model. He was a wealthy importer, named Hsieh, in America on a diplomatic passport as the representative of the Bank of China. Nationalist Hsieh fell for Marion Saunders, a sensational slick chick with platinum hair, from Indiana. It became a terrific romance. Cafe socialites kidded that he bought her a new mink coat every day.
The Treasury heard about the dough he was lavishing on her. They looked him up, discovered that as a nonresident alien he was exempt from American income taxes. But Mr. Hsieh had forgotten gift taxes. Under the law the donor, not the recipient, is liable for payment--25 percent. The Feds tracked down gifts aggregating $1,000,000--the untraced value was far higher. Mr. Hsieh was soaked $540,000--tax plus fines. He was allowed to pay in three installments. He pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off 180 G-notes for the down payment.
Some months later, Hsieh and Marion were married. Ginmill habitués said he married her to get his dough back. That couldn’t be so, because one day, last year, the Queen Mary came in with $2,000,000 in gold consigned to him. It was landed under guard of six armed Chinese, toted off in steel-lined limousines.
Which reminds us of the story never told before, too good to keep.
One of the benches in Lafayette Square, gathering place of the faggots, across from the White House, is wired up. You ought to hear some of the gay conversations. We did. Then we squirted penicillin in our ears.
