Word: fbi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like other agents in charge of the FBI's 59 field offices, John F. Malone, known as "Cement Head" to his colleagues, was a cautious man. When he headed the New York City office from 1962 to 1975, he followed the instructions of FBI headquarters to the letter and stashed his most sensitive papers in a private safe to keep them beyond the reach of nosy congressional investigators...
Malone must have forgotten his superiors' orders to shred each year what was probably the touchiest record of all. Thus, when he retired last year, he left behind in his safe a list of apparently illegal burglaries conducted by FBI agents in New York and other cities since 1971 in a desperate attempt to uncover information about Weatherman bombings and the fugitive bomb throwers. The list moved through FBI channels to the Justice Department and exploded last week like a bombshell...
...list showed that Clarence Kelley, who became FBI director in 1973, had either been misled by his colleagues or, as one of them suspected, been doublecrossed. Reason: for about a year, Kelley has been assuring everybody that in 1966 J. Edgar Hoover had ordered agents to stop using burglaries, known as "black bag jobs," to gather evidence in domestic cases. Since then, says Kelley, the FBI has resorted to break-ins only in a handful of investigations involving foreign spies in the U.S. As Malone's list demonstrated, however, the FBI kept conducting burglaries-the last...
Full Security. TIME has learned that a typical operation began with a phone call to a high FBI official in Washington from a field supervisor who believed that clues to the whereabouts of a Weatherman fugitive might be found in a New York apartment. With Malone's go-ahead, the supervisor then wrote to one of the bureau's assistant directors in Washington for approval of an investigation employing an "unorthodox" or "unusual" technique and promising "full security." Attached to the request was a detailed explanation of what was meant by full security. Recalled an FBI official...
...FBI officials told TIME that as many as 150 agents had a hand in between 75 and 100 bag jobs. A few occurred before Hoover's death in May 1972, but many took place under Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, who resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal. Gray refused to comment, but Malone has acknowledged that the list "could have been" in his safe. Some FBI officials suspect that Gray was pressured by the Nixon White House to approve the use of bag jobs. As one agent explained the rationale: "These Weathermen were bomb throwers. The pressure...