J. Edgar Hoover
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J. Edgar Hoover founded and ran the FBI for 48 years, and, in John Kiriakou's institutional histories, cast the mold for everything he distrusts about Washington's security agencies.

The lie that created the CIA

Hoover was adamantly opposed to the creation of the CIA, he famously hated Bill Donovan, founder of its predecessor OSS, and his opposition made the National Security Act of 1947 a close-run thing. President Truman lifted the objection, Kiriakou says, by disingenuously assuring Hoover that the CIA would be a very small entity reporting to the FBI, a division of it. "That was a lie. He said that only to keep Hoover away." Hoover assumed the new agency would land inside his Bureau, with him leading it; it did not. The two agencies, Kiriakou notes, have hated each other ever since.

He puts the Bureau's own age against it: the FBI dated to the 1920s and Hoover ran it from 1927 until his death in 1972, the only director the organisation had ever known, an institution "created in his image." The manoeuvre that beat him was correspondingly personal. Hoover had been actively lobbying for no votes on Capitol Hill, enough to have killed the act that created both the CIA and the National Security Council; Truman called him into the Oval Office and traded the promise for his silence, and Bill Donovan, who had the president's ear, insisted throughout that the new agency stand on its own. When the bill passed and the promise was not kept, Hoover was livid and never forgave it. Kiriakou's reading of the signature is that Truman did not really understand what he was signing that day, and that he later called it one of the worst decisions of his presidency.

The playbook

Kiriakou treats Hoover as the original author of the budget theater he later watched the CIA perform: going to Congress every year, scaring members about threats to the country, and demanding, and getting, ridiculous increases. "That is what J. Edgar Hoover had perfected in the '30s, '40s and '50s." The image machine was equally airtight: into the early 1970s, no show or movie about the FBI could be made without Hoover's approval, which is why everything Hollywood produced about the Bureau was positive. "The CIA does the same thing now." Hoover's blind-faith cult at the top of the FBI, he adds, did not die with him, it recurred with Freeh, Mueller, and Comey. The mechanism is now institutional rather than personal: the Bureau keeps an office of public affairs whose sole job is cooperating with Hollywood studios, a practice Kiriakou traces to the early 1950s, when no studio had the nerve even to pitch a show about the FBI without Hoover's approval.

Hoover also supplies Kiriakou's model of the career-making priority, the "flavor of the day" that determines whose cases get made. Communism under Hoover in the 1950s, organised crime in the 1980s, and the prosecution of Julian Assange today all work the same way: make a case in the top priority and your career is golden.

Blackmail, Roy Cohn, and the one man who fought back

Kiriakou's fullest account of how the Bureau used sexual material centres on Roy Cohn, whom he calls one of the darkest, ugliest figures in modern American history: a notorious gay man in the years when he was personally in charge of ruining the lives of gay men, as out as anyone could be in the early 1950s, and very close both to Senator Joseph McCarthy and to Hoover, whom Kiriakou describes as a deeply closeted gay man.

The case he tells is of a Democratic congressman whose vote on the FBI budget they wanted. The man had had an affair; the threat was to tell both his wife and the newspapers in his district. On principle he answered that he was not afraid of them, so they told his wife and released it to the press. He was finished, and he used the interval between the election and the swearing-in of the new Congress to give a speech on the floor of the House every day, saying that Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson lived, in his words, as man and wife in Hoover's home, and that both had had sexual relations with Cohn. Kiriakou notes that the domestic detail was true, the two owned houses next door to each other but lived in Hoover's, and dates the episode to about 1953 or 1954. The congressman was ruined, and was "the only one who ever fought back."

Cohn was in his twenties at the time, and Kiriakou's point in telling it is what he did with the lessons: he carried the methods of McCarthy and Hoover into business, attached himself to Donald Trump in the 1970s as mentor, adviser and attorney, and, in the view of many, which Kiriakou reports, taught him the ruthlessness still on display. Cohn died of AIDS in the 1980s, alone and unloved, buried in the family vault of a family friend who took pity because nobody would attend the funeral.

Hoover's violence against domestic movements he states plainly: Fred Hampton was executed in cold blood by the FBI because Hoover feared what he called the black messiah, the possibility of a single figure who could unite Black America.

The gay section of Congressional Cemetery

The story Kiriakou tells last is a posthumous one. Hoover is buried in Washington's Congressional Cemetery, about thirty feet from Tolson. People then began buying the plots around them, with the result that the founder and director of the FBI now lies at the dead centre of what Kiriakou says is the only officially gay section of any cemetery in America.

See also

- CIA
- FBI
- Roy Cohn
- Bill Donovan
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- The CIA and Hollywood
- Operation Mockingbird
