Word: hoover
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Mail Covers. Early last year, the Nixon Administration, too, began to worry that the government was not using its intelligence resources effectively enough. A committee of intelligence experts, assembled by the White House with Hoover as chairman, met for weeks discussing ways of coping with foreign spies, racial unrest, campus disorders and leftists in the antiwar movement. Finally, the committee suggested a sweeping expansion of federal intelligence work. Specifically, the committee urged wider use of wiretapping, inspection of letters-"mail covers" -surreptitious entries and bag jobs. Sullivan sympathized with the committee's objectives. Hoover, although chairman, firmly dissented...
Civil libertarians have long condemned such tactics; Hoover's restrictions, however, resulted only from a pragmatic desire to avoid embarrassing incidents and from his belief that American public opinion would not condone "dirty games" by FBI agents. Along with these strictures, the federal anti-racketeering statutes of the 1960s increased FBI responsibility for organized-crime cases and hence necessarily reduced the number of agents available for espionage assignments...
...restrictions and manpower cuts, Sullivan believed, reduced the FBI's capacity to cope with spies at a time when the Soviets were expanding their espionage networks in the U.S. There is thus the irony that Hoover, so often accused of an "archaic" anti-Communist preoccupation, was actually less militant on the subject, in some ways, than Sullivan...
...Hoover's familiar thesis that Communists are behind New Left extremists. Sullivan expressed far greater concern that leftist excesses would drive the nation's moderates, its "vital center," toward a dangerous rightist reaction...
Publicly, the President has had nothing but praise for Hoover; he showed up at an FBI academy graduation last June to say: "The great majority of Americans back Mr. Hoover." Privately, Nixon's men became increasingly critical. In espionage cases, they said, Hoover's FBI, by carrying out fewer bag jobs, failed to supply the raw material that the National Security Agency needed to break codes. "The codes might have been used by the deep-cover 'illegals,' the foreign spies," explained a Justice Department official. "Hoover hasn't caught an illegal in the last...