HOOVER'S FBI AND ANGLO-AMERICAN DICTATORSHIP

Hoover’s FBI and 

Anglo-American Dictatorship

By Anton Chaitkin

Part I: 

The Beginnings 

The Wall Street/London coup which gave birth to J. Edgar Hoover and the modern Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) completed its first phase in 1901 with the assassination of President William McKinley. The murder of President McKinley would then lead to two disastrous future U.S. Presidencies—those of Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Each of these men was raised revering his family’s leadership role in the Southern Confederacy, and each was passionately attached to the British aristocracy that had sponsored Southern secession. Both men would be essential to shaping the FBI and the career of J. Edgar Hoover. 

Shortly after assuming the Presidency, and with his man William Taft already in Manila, Roosevelt set about transforming the Philippines into America’s first colonial venture. Taft’s sponsors envisioned Philippine plantations with coolie labor, and Anglo-American imperial adventures on the Asian mainland. With Teddy in the White House, a regime of cruelty and despotism was imposed to crush Filipino resistance as Britain’s colonial police did in India and Ireland, and as Emperor Napoleon’s secret police had done. 

In his history of this tyranny, historian Alfred McCoy told of “five separate secret services ... with spies and agents in a ceaseless surveillance of Filipino leaders and their private lives ... media monitoring, psychological profiling ... disinformation, penetration, manipulation ... assassination .... Armed resistance was met with mass slaughter by artillery and repeating rifles ....” If they “had something on you,” anything humiliating, it could be used to destroy you or turn you into their spy.1 

This Philippines experiment had a technical manager, a U.S. Army officer named Ralph Van Deman. He systematized surveillance and dirt-collection on every person publicly active in any way in the country. Van Deman’s secret service methods enabled efficient government by fear, blackmail, and the disappearance of the troublesome. 

President Teddy Roosevelt also connived with Britain to bully Latin America for financiers’ debts. He defied Congressional direction to negotiate with Colombia for a canal route through Colombia’s province of Panama: a covert Wall Street team ran a fake revolution stealing Panama from Colombia. Oregon’s Senator John H. Mitchell attacked the Panama adventure as a House of Morgan swindle. 

The President went after Senator Mitchell with a special prosecutor, private detectives, and the Treasury Department’s Secret Service. The Senator and scores of his political allies were indicted for “land frauds,” with the system of spies, perjury, and blackmail being tried out in the Philippines. Mitchell was convicted, defamed in the press, and died before he could appeal. 

Teddy Roosevelt now moved to create a permanent national secret police. 

He made Charles Bonaparte his Attorney General in 1906: Charles was Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s great nephew, an Anglophile High Society prince, an admirer of lynching and police shootings. Bonaparte told Congress that the Department of Justice must be given “a force of permanent police . .. under its control.” The idea was to put the Treasury Department’s Secret Service (mandated only to guard the currency and protect the President) into use for general domestic espionage. 

Amidst great fear, Congress resisted. Kentucky Democrat Joseph S. Sherley said, “an instrument so dangerous should never be given to an executive unless safeguarded in every way against abuse ... as a spy system.” America’s Constitution is not “a system of spying on men and prying into what would ordinarily be designated as their private affairs, to determine whether or not a crime has been committed ....”2 Teddy replied that interference by Congress “will benefit only one class of people—and that is the criminal class .. . there is no more foolish outcry than this against ‘spies’; only criminals need fear our detectives.”3 

The Congress voted May 27, 1908 to prohibit the use of the Treasury Department’s Secret Service men as police by the Justice or any other department. Roosevelt sneered that it was “of benefit only to the criminal classes .. . . The chief argument in favor of the provision was that the Congressmen did not themselves wish to be investigated by Secret Service men.”4 Iowa Republican Walter Smith responded, hitting both Bonaparte’s family record and British imperial crimes: “In a free country, no general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the empire, and at one time in Ireland, should be allowed to grow up ....”5 

Straining under the Congressional restriction, Bonaparte, on Teddy Roosevelt’s instructions, created a small investigative agency within the Department of Justice. It was soon thereafter called the Bureau of Investigation (in 1935, the name would be changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation). 

But this instrument was insufficient for its intended purpose, and the climate did not then exist for its effective use to suppress opposition to the Anglo-American dictatorship.

Part II: 

An American Secret Police

The British Secret Service in Sleepy Hollow

 

Sleepy Hollow Country Club, site of British operative Claude Dansey’s intrigues with Wall Street 1911-1914.

Beginning in 1909, the British King Edward VII, together with his Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane, began restructuring British intelligence, making two branches of the official secret service later called MI5 (domestic/counterintelligence) and MI6 (foreign). Beginning in 1910, the new Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, arranged great new powers of surveillance for the secret service, a “registry” of subversives and the clandestine interception of private mail; he put through Parliament a drastic new Official Secrets Act, and recommended passage of a eugenical sterilization law to save the war-destined Empire the expenses of caring for the “unfit.” 

America itself was the prize to be captured in the planned war. 

To coordinate this mission inside the United States, the British secret service assigned Claude Dansey, then a veteran 34-year-old intelligence officer. Dansey had been spy and soldier in Africa and Borneo, and had befriended Winston Churchill in the Boer War. 

Claude Dansey first met in the Congo with a syndicate of American oligarchs who had invested capital in support of Belgian King Leopold’s slave-labor rubber plantation schemes. Among this group’s leaders was Nelson Aldrich, the most powerful U.S. Senator, father in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and intimate of J.P. Morgan. 

In the Autumn of 1911, Captain Dansey took up the full-time position of Resident Secretary of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club, on the Hudson River above New York City. The Rockefeller family had bought this palatial property in 1910 and had created the Club the next year. The Club’s chairman was Frank Vanderlip, president of the Rockefeller's/Stillman National City Bank, and he had brought Dansey in from the start. 

Sleepy Hollow membership was beyond exclusive: Rockefellers and their partners, Morgan men, other ultra-rich friends, including partners in the Aldrich syndicate such as Thomas F. Ryan and Harry Payne Whitney, the latter an heir to Standard Oil. Dansey was particularly close to Ryan and the Whitneys, who had power in the Democratic Party. 

Captain Dansey was revered by Club members as a real English gentleman, being above their rank as the descendant of a Duke. As a British secret agent inside America, Dansey ran the spy apparatus that Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch had built up in the late Nineteenth Century against Irish-Americans and other anti-British U.S. citizens. 

Then, in November 1912, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected U.S. President. 

Wilson immediately stripped Black government employees of all rights and imposed strict racial segregation in Washington. Claude Dansey was in the Administration as eminence grise to Wilson’s political manager, Edward House, English-educated son of a British Confederate blockade-runner into Texas, and now political boss of Texas. 

Nelson Aldrich’s Federal Reserve Act and Income Tax Amendment passed Congress in 1913. 

Claude Dansey left Sleepy Hollow in mid-1914, returning London to work at British Intelligence headquarters. A few weeks later, World War I broke out in Europe. 

A clamor arose among American Anglophiles for the United States to join England in the conflict. In September 1914, one month after Britain declared war, The New Republic published its first issue as an American propaganda organ for an Anglo-American alliance. Dorothy Whitney, sister of Congo syndicate member Harry Payne Whitney, and her husband Willard Straight, a Morgan partner working under Sleepy Hollow’s Henry Davidson, had launched the magazine based on the cold precepts of H.G. Wells. They made Walter Lippmann, a slavish Wells follower, the editor. 

War and Inquisition 

Upon America’s entry in World War I, Claude Dansey came to Washington, D.C. on behalf of British intelligence and adopted Ralph Van Deman as his understudy. He explained the organization and operation of British intelligence to the awe-struck Anglophile— but not, of course, how the British penetrate the leadership of foreign nations such as America, but how Anglo-Saxon rulers police their population. 

Years later, Van Deman proposed that the United States should award his mentor Claude Dansey the Distinguished Service Medal, for guiding the planning and implementation of an American intelligence service. Dansey had a desk in Van Deman’s office, “where he could be in touch with everything that was going on. As the Intelligence Section grew and began to take shape, Dansey was called on to give lectures to them, and to the General Staff, lectures which took place behind locked doors guarded by armed soldiers.”6 

British Intelligence officer Claude Dansey, who designed America’s secret police.

America’s military leaders had not been interested in Van Deman’s plans until Claude Dansey moved into Washington. According to his British biographers, Dansey put his Sleepy Hollow “rolodex” to good use: 

“His contacts from those years .. . controlled banks and railroads in public utilities, as well as production of vital material such as rubber, copper and oil. They were also able to pull strings for him and gain him access to men of power such as Secretary of War Newton Baker” to put the plan through.7 

Ralph Van Deman thus became the boss of a secret police, and, as we shall see, this intrusion into American life would be immediately extended to include the Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover. Van Deman and his Philippines-veteran staff went into furious action for the short period the United States would be in the European war. They worked up a “suspect list” consisting of “many hundreds of thousands” of cards on Americans, as had been done earlier in the Philippines.8 

The prime suspects were German/Americans, Irish/Americans, those tied to India, Blacks, immigrants— all considered surveillance-worthy because they were perceived to have a reason to be disloyal to the Anglo/American cause. 

This was the madness of war and revenge, when the mass mind can become less than human, and manipulable. With the newspapers (many Wall Street-controlled and under wartime censorship) and the government inducing fear and xenophobia, a vast private army of vigilante spies called the American Protective League (A.P.L) was created while Dansey was instructing Van Deman in the first weeks the United States was in the war. 

By arrangement with the Justice Department, Van Deman’s Military Intelligence Division (M.I.D) officers directly supervised the civilian A.P.L in coordination with D.O.J’s tiny Bureau of Investigation. The A.P.L’s 350,000 members became official government agents, as the A.P.L badges had it, “Auxiliary to the U.S. Department of Justice.” 

A.P.L operatives—zealots, cranks, those with private grudges—did millions of investigations, raids, and arrests, and filed 400,000 reports to the government, in a hysterical climate. Guided locally by bankers or corporate officers, they targeted labor organizers and all dissidents. Since predatory trusts had seized the main industries, had destroyed labor relations, and provoked class warfare, Wall Street welcomed the crackdown. 

But how was Wall Street involved? 

Again, the British biographers fill us in: “At Dansey’s suggestion, and initially with his personal help, Van Deman and his people made contact with the efficient information and intelligence departments of the large banks such as National City Bank (in whose board room Dansey had been appointed Resident Secretary of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club and with whose directors he was on intimate terms), and J.P. Morgan and Company (with whom he had close connections through Ryan), and with large corporations such as the Standard Oil companies and the United States Steel Corporation. The success of the scheme depended largely on the confidence which the directors of the corporations concerned had in the military intelligence chiefs and it was invaluable for Van Deman and his successor, General Marlborough Churchill (a very distant American relative of Winston), to have someone like Claude Dansey to help establish personal contact. By the end of the war, virtually every organization with branch offices in the U.S. and abroad was involved.”9 

In the midst of this horrible devolution of Constitutional government, the 22-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was first recruited (1917). Just out of law school, he was put in charge of the Department of Justice’s War Emergency Division’s Enemy Alien Bureau. Immersed in the wildly lawless wartime counterinsurgency, Hoover thus began working with Ralph Van Deman in a partnership that was to last for 35 years, until Van Deman’s death.

The Birth of Fascism 

In February 1919, President Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as Attorney General. Palmer had been Alien Property Custodian through the war, coordinating with the young J. Edgar Hoover. National strikes loomed in the steel mills and coal mines, and Attorney General Palmer created a General Intelligence (or “Radical”) Division in the Bureau of Investigation, and appointed Hoover its head. Military Intelligence and Hoover’s agents working together as a single secret service now built up a network of civilian vigilante spies, informers and provocateurs. 

With former MID chief Van Deman back in Washington to advise him, Hoover compiled 200,000 cards on “subversives,” precisely as Van Deman had done in the Philippines. The wartime American Protective League had been formally dissolved, but the MID/Bureau team put it back into action in various guises. 

President Wilson had revived the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 with a White House pre-screening and endorsement of D.W. Griffith’s sensational Klan propaganda “Birth of a Nation,” a film based on Wilson’s own pro Klan writings and on those of Wilson’s close friend Thomas Dixon. After the war, Southern A.P.L members suddenly flooded into the government-approved movement, and it was quickly spread northward. 

The MID-Bureau team recruited returning war veterans into the American Legion. After Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. had convened its start-up conference in St. Louis in May 1919, the Legion was built as the main adjunct to the Federal secret police, growing to over a million members by the end of the year. The Legion, directed by Military Intelligence Chicago station chief Major Thomas Crockett, who had activated covert A.P.L operations across the country, sacked Midwestern political offices. All dissent, any militancy by labor or Blacks, was attributed to the influence of the Russian Bolsheviks or other “reds.”

Hoover’s Southern Scottish Rite “brother,” Klan founder Albert Pike, still has a prominent statue in Washington, D.C.

These auxiliaries were now set loose in the “Palmer Raids,” an orgiastic war on unions, radicals, civil rights advocates, teachers, and immigrants from November 1919 to January 1920. This initial descent into a police state was, however, deeply opposed by the American population, and sparked popular protests and outrage. In 1921, incoming President Warren Harding sought to end wartime emergency government. Detective William J. Burns became Bureau of Investigation Director and cut the number of agents in half.

Part III: 

Hoover as The Seat of Government

What Was Hoover? 

J. Edgar Hoover was peculiarly fitted, as Palmer’s deputy, to supervise political mass arrests, deportations, lynchings, terror propaganda, and witch-hunts. 

He was a grotesquely deformed personality. His father died of depression in 1921 after years of paranoia, breakdowns, and institutionalization's. J. Edgar continued living alone with his fiercely domineering mother in the Washington, D.C house where he was born, until her death in 1938 when he was 43 years old. 

As a youth, he gloried in the revived militant rule of the Southern White Man. Beginning George Washington University in 1913, just as President Wilson had segregated the capital city, he got active in the Kappa Alpha Order. 

While organizing the Red Scare of 1919, Hoover was treasurer of the Kappa Alpha’s Washington, D.C. chapter. 

The Order was founded in Virginia after the Civil War, and spread through the South as a campus companion to the Ku Klux Klan night riders. It pronounced its spiritual affinity with Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Gentleman. But Kappa Alpha Order shared with the Klan its rituals, ranks, and organizational roots in the Anglo-American secret world of Southern Scottish Rite Masonry.10 

Hoover surrounded himself with Southern White Masons in the Kappa Alpha tradition. They were his highest subordinate officers. Hoover himself was raised a Master Mason on November 9, 1920, in Federal Lodge No. 1. He would put a Southern White Masonic unit inside the Bureau itself, called the Fidelity Chapter. He would insist that his agents refer to the Bureau, and his office, as The Seat of Government. 

The Southern Scottish Rite moved its headquarters from South Carolina to Washington in 1901, to better carry out its responsibilities in governing the new American empire in the Philippines. Just when the bullet put Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, they put up in Judiciary Square a giant statue honoring its legendary leader, Secession conspirator and Confederate general and Klan founder Albert Pike. J. Edgar Hoover was rising in the secret police under Woodrow Wilson in 1918, when Harper and Brothers published a new edition of President Wilson’s History of the American People. On page 286, which features photos and drawings of the founding post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan leaders as icons and heroes, Albert Pike is the largest picture, in the center in his full Scottish Rite regalia, and billed as the Klan’s “Chief Judicial Officer.” 

Albert Pike is buried in the wall at the Scottish Rite House of the Temple in Washington; alongside is a complete mock up of J. Edgar Hoover’s office and memorabilia, celebrating the most significant Twentieth Century Scottish Rite leader in the Albert Pike tradition. 

The Call for Dictatorship 

From the beginning of the first World War, New Republic editor Walter Lippmann had commanded America to impose a military draft and go to war, while he planned a post-war Wellsian world order. He was commissioned a Captain, and assigned to Intelligence in France under the direction of Edward House. Ralph Van Deman later explained how Lippmann fit in. 

Van Deman had come to Paris from London with Claude Dansey on October 2, 1918.

The next morning Captain Walter Lippmann came to the office . .. and I had a talk with him concerning propaganda . . . On October 5th, Walter Lippmann came in to tell me that he had seen Secretary Baker . .. and that I was to take up the propaganda matter with General McAndrews, Chief of Staff, AEF. Colonel Dansey and the British Military Control Officer from Belgrade came in and after luncheon we discussed intelligence matters . . . . 11 

In 1922, Lippmann called for a dictatorship over the United States to replace the Constitutional system, in his book Public Opinion. 

Lippmann proclaimed the general public incapable of exercising reasoned judgment. They can think only in “stereotypes” so they believe falsely in “villains and conspiracies. If prices go up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if newspapers misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too rich, they have been stealing .. . .”12 These dangerous conspiracy theories he then conflates with the every kind of right wing notion such as Negro self-assertion, short skirts being Communist, and Catholic, Jewish, Japanese, or Masonic plots. 

To overcome such ignorance, consent must be engineered by an elite class of experts, using “propaganda.” They are to be employed as a professional intelligence corps which will guide the national government from within its every department. This intelligence dictatorship will be permanent, and appointed, not elected, to serve for life. 

When the House of Morgan’s U.S. Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone elevated J. Edgar Hoover to head the Bureau in 1924, Stone did not want to repeat the hysterical atmosphere of the Palmer Raids. The explosive public response to the outrages forced a redirection, a more guarded approach. The new Director would exactly fulfill Lippmann’s call for “efficient” control of public opinion. 

Hoover was a bulldog. He had no female connection beyond his mother, and no real friends. While studying for his law degrees, he had done night-shifts at the Library of Congress, filing and painstakingly compiling information in categories. He had a steel-trap memory for details that might be used as weapons. At the Bureau he worked all the time, and demanded his subordinates do the same.

British viceroys John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller Jr., who, along with J.P. Morgan, put J. Edgar Hoover in power.

He venerated authority, knowing nothing of principles that should justify it. He proved he would do absolutely anything, quietly destroy or kill, to defend the power of those who sponsored him. This reverence began with Harlan Stone, Rockefeller, Morgan, British gentlemen, his “betters.” It went on to cruder sorts with deep pockets for him, the Texas fascist oligarchs Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and H.L. Hunt. In the British imperial tradition, he was excited to use the ugliest and most lawless methods, in a universe of insider secrets, to preserve what was respected. This allowed free association with organized crime while publicly denying its very existence. 

The appointment was effectively for life, as Lippmann had specified for the intelligence dictatorship. Hoover’s cunning sense of political winds, his attachment of the Bureau to the British Secret Intelligence Service, and to those U.S. military elements compatible with his views, allowed him to gather and hold power for half a century. 

‘Professionals’ 

Attorney General Harlan Stone instructed Hoover that he was to remodel the Bureau on the lines of Britain’s Scotland Yard, for efficiency. 

For public acceptance, a national secret police must be “professional.” Under Hoover, the Bureau brought in whatever was up-to-date in “forensics.” 

The use of unique individual fingerprints for identification was first developed by the British Imperial administration in India. Sir William Herschel studied the phenomenon for 20 years before applying it to the management of prisoners in Bengal in the 1870's. The subject was taken up, at Charles Darwin’s suggestion, by his cousin Francis Galton as a companion to Galton’s invention of “eugenics”—the science of perpetuating the better people by the destruction of the weaker. Galton’s 1892 book, Finger Prints, was the definitive introduction of the matter to the attention of governments. The Empire established a Fingerprint Bureau in Calcutta in 1898, and within Scotland Yard in 1901. 

French police officer Alphonse Bertillon developed the science of anthropometry, the use of bodily measurements in analyzing crime. Bertillon’s expert testimony in the famous Dreyfus case contributed greatly to the wrongful conviction, with his dubious science masking anti-Semitism and anti-German warmongering. Bertillon inspired Arthur Conan Doyle for his Sherlock Holmes detective stories. 

The Bureau expended considerable resources advertising its effective use of these laboratory tools. The fact that Hoover’s reign coincided with a sensational outburst of crime in the United States—syndicate gangster-ism, audacious Wall Street looting schemes, mass lynching of Blacks, the Ku Klux Klan marching in Washington and the Midwest—did not seem to diminish public faith in the Professionalism of the Bureau’s methods. 

J. Edgar Hoover’s agents constructed a nationwide grid of thousands of informers, spies, and criminals. An individual would be leaned on and “turned” to the Bureau’s use; this was the case with many homosexuals, blackmailed through fear of exposure.

Hoover used the threat of his secret files to blackmail Congress into submission, extracting constantly expanding budgets. He gained influence within every department of the Federal government, and leveraging the hand of the Bureau in local police departments, within local and state governments as well. From the 1920s onward, Bureau agents visited colleges and book publishers, coercing them to silence or purge dissenters. Direct Bureau pressure on newspapers, for censorship and to publish Hoover’s stream of propaganda, combined with increasing Wall Street ownership to form a media cartel as effective as any overt tyrant could construct. In 1928 Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda celebrated the success of his own class of Wall Street-paid opinion molders: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... It is not usually recognized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life.. . 13

Part IV: 

FDR Takes Charge

By the end of the 1920s, the hurricane of crime by London and Wall Street had obliterated the world economy. When the Great Depression hit, Hoover blamed the general lawlessness on inefficient, corrupt local politicians and police. Power to the Bureau was the solution. 

The Headline: “American Crime Records Found of Little Use.” The story: “The Bureau of Investigation .. . under J. Edgar Hoover . .. has been actively preparing for the collection of local police crime records . .. and will . .. be taking over the work . .. which has previously been done by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation. The I.A.C.P and the Rockefeller's asked for Hoover to take over and this was authorized ... by a law passed in the last Congress.”14

Hoover told Congress why Depression-ruined communities were restless: “The Communist Party . . . has organized a . . . committee to incite revolutionary activities among the Negroes and to send selected Negroes to Moscow for . . . communistic training for world revolution . . . . The communists stirred up discontent among the unemployed American wage earners . . . .”15 

Yet the global collapse opened up the possibility that new leadership might reverse the destruction of human society. 

Franklin Roosevelt had changed deeply since his role as Assistant Navy Secretary in the Wilson Administration’s wartime and post-war actions. 

While recovering from polio beginning in 1921, FDR found a passion for America’s founding mission and assessed the Anglo-American financiers as the nation’s lethal enemy.16 Aware of his opponents’ astonishingly evil intentions, he assembled a political machine to recover American sovereign power. 

War at the Outset 

A potential large popular majority backed Roosevelt’s strategic turn, but he first had to prevail in a bloody struggle. 

He broke the dominance of the Morgan-run Democratic Party leaders and installed his close friend Thomas J. Walsh as the 1932 Democratic convention chairman. 

Montana Senator Walsh “knew where the bodies were buried.” 

Thomas Walsh had led the battle at the 1921 Senate hearings on the Justice Department’s illegal practices. There he confronted Palmer and his deputy Hoover with evidence they had perpetrated “an orgy of terror, violence and crime against citizens and aliens....” Under Walsh’s questioning, Hoover told him the Justice Dept. had suffered under the Constitutional “handicap” that immigrants were entitled to have lawyers, and had changed “Rule 22” to eliminate that right. 

Hoover had to burn quietly as Walsh introduced a confidential memo sent to a Boston Bureau agent December 27, 1919:

If possible you should arrange with your undercover informants to have meetings of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party held on the night set. I have been informed by some of the bureau officers that such arrangements will be made. This, of course, would facilitate the making of the arrests. On the evening of the arrests, this office will be open the entire night, and I desire that you communicate by long distance [telephone] to Mr. Hoover any matters of importance (during the course of the arrests .... 17 

Walsh remained in the Senate as J. Edgar Hoover’s dedicated enemy. 

FDR’s Attorney General designee Thomas J. Walsh, who died shockingly after announcing he would clean out the DOJ

After Senator Walsh had presided over his Presidential nomination victory, Roosevelt rallied previously hopeless millions by speaking out as others feared to do. He directly assailed the predators who had to be displaced from power: 

We find two-thirds of American industry concentrated in a few hundred corporations, and actually managed by not more than five human individuals . .. fewer than three dozen private banking houses, and stock-selling adjuncts of commercial banks, directing the flow of American capital .... The Government, without becoming a prying bureaucracy, can act as a check or counterbalance to this oligarchy so as to secure the chance to work and the safety of savings to men and women, rather than . .. safety of manipulation to the financial manipulators . . . . 18 

Roosevelt won the election November 8, 1932; he was to take office in March. 

On February 15, 1933, an assassin shot at President-elect Roosevelt; but the shot hit and killed a member of FDR’s entourage, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. 

On February 26, Roosevelt made it known he would appoint Senator Thomas J. Walsh as U.S. Attorney General. 

On March 1, the New York Times reported Walsh’s pledge that “he would re-organize the Department of Justice when he assumes office, probably with an almost completely new personnel.”19 

Walsh was found dead the next morning, while on a train to Washington, D.C. for Roosevelt’s March 4 inauguration and his own swearing-in. 

Senator Walsh’s son-in-law, Navy Captain Emmett C. Gudger, believing Walsh had been poisoned, insisted on an autopsy. When that was refused, Gudger tried unsuccessfully to have the body exhumed. A Bureau agent had been on the death train, and when Director Hoover personally met the train on arrival in Washington, that agent gave him a complete account. Stunned by Walsh’s sudden death, FDR took no action to displace J. Edgar Hoover. 

That July 1933, and the following Spring 1934, American Legion officials paid by Morgan’s men asked Marine Corps General Smedley Butler to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt, based on their study of how European fascists had used veterans to seize power. When the plot to overthrow the government hit the headlines, General Butler went to J. Edgar Hoover for action. Hoover refused: there was no evidence a federal criminal statute had been violated.

‘The President Authorized It’ 

Although J. Edgar Hoover’s publicity machine pumped him as the scourge of bank robbers and kidnappers, he never felt safe openly challenging FDR. Historians have generally received without question Hoover’s own dubious accounts of their relationship. For example: He met with FDR August 24, 1936, and then claimed that Roosevelt had asked him to investigate “subversives”—i.e., had authorized his unlimited power to hunt for fascists, but especially communists. This passed into accepted history. 

Hoover had just previously won a round in his power struggle with the Administration. One newspaper report read: 

Departmental jealousy roused by the meteoric rise of J. Edgar Hoover .. . came out into the open today as two Secret Service men of the Treasury Department were demoted for allegedly spying on G-men [FBI] activities . ... The situation is likely to have a far-reaching reaction, with the smoldering opposition to Mr. Hoover coming to the front from certain elements who admire him as an executive, but believe his personal publicity should be curbed. The late Senator Thomas J. Walsh, selected by Mr. Roosevelt originally for Attorney General, for example, is said to have declared that one of his first acts would be to oust J. Edgar Hoover.20 

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had sought to slow down Hoover’s well-connected power grab. He was outmaneuvered and had to apologize. 

As World War II broke out in Europe, President Roosevelt asked citizens and police to report sabotage or espionage to the FBI. Hoover on his own initiative, under cover of these orders, formed a Custodial Detention Index, detailing all persons who should be subject to arrest in case of emergency. American Civil Liberties Director Roger Baldwin was on the list. In mid-1943, long after the United States had entered the war, Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Hoover to abolish the secret list. Hoover changed its name to Security Index and continued to maintain it. 

Hoover’s Targets 

A review of J. Edgar Hoover’s most important enemies in the Roosevelt era will offer a preview of his part in the betrayal of the country after FDR’s death. 

Medal of Honor winner Colonel William J. Donovan first ran up against Hoover in 1924, when he was his immediate superior in the Justice Department. Donovan saw what Hoover was and soon asked for him to be fired. He had then tried to stop Harlan Stone from making Hoover the Director. Incoming President Herbert Hoover (no relation to J. Edgar) considered appointing Donovan Attorney General in 1929; Director Hoover ran the covert campaign that aborted the nomination. 

FDR had to navigate treacherous waters in preparing the country to deal with the ongoing war between Britain, whose Empire he despised, and the fascist Axis, which that Empire had promoted and built up against Russia. Roosevelt began shaping a U.S. intelligence capability under the President’s centralized control, to be guided by Colonel Donovan. From 1941 to the end of the war, J. Edgar Hoover used every available weapon to sabotage Donovan and to preserve his own pre-eminence. Britain officially coordinated with Donovan and his Office of Strategic Services, but increasingly teamed with Hoover to target their mutual enemies, and thus pre-determine the shape of the postwar world. 

Hoover’s FBI carried out a long war to discredit and deport Albert Einstein, a refugee from likely death in Hitler-plagued Europe. Britain’s science elite loathed him as the man who had shattered their dead-universe doctrine. It was Einstein who had alerted President Roosevelt to the danger of Nazi Germany’s possible development of an atomic bomb. But Hoover’s covert circulation of “subversive” slanders led the Army to block Einstein himself from participating in the U.S. bomb program, the Manhattan Project. 

Treasury official Harry Dexter White began formulating FDR’s plans for a prosperous postwar world before the United States entered the war. White designed the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to be instruments in lifting poor nations into modern times, thereby securing peace. J. Edgar Hoover built up files against White and pressed for his removal on the bogus charge he was a communist. Britain’s ambassador Lord Halifax visited Roosevelt to claim White was a Russian agent. Knowing Halifax had led Britain’s efforts to build up Hitler’s power, FDR showed him the door. 

Hoover campaigned covertly against Vice President Henry Wallace, shadowed him everywhere, and planted gossip, to prevent him from seeking his reelection with FDR in 1944. Finally, powerbroker Charles Marsh, an oilman in the circles of Hoover’s Texas patrons and an avid agent of the British Foreign Office, hosted a party with Wallace where British agents were able to steal a copy of Wallace’s draft pamphlet, outlining the Administration’s plans to dismantle Britain’s Asian empire. The pamphlet was sent to Winston Churchill, and the British and Hoover thereafter used their American political assets to force Wallace off the 1944 ticket. 

Thus it was Harry Truman who succeeded FDR in 1945, not Wallace. Truman invited Winston Churchill to define America’s policy as a Cold War—permanent war—and the merger of American and British strategic agencies. 

Intelligence agents loyal to Roosevelt’s outlook were immediately sacked after his death. William Donovan made a bid to be appointed head of the new Central Intelligence Agency, but Hoover moved successfully to block him, and boasted about it to the end of his life. 

After Harry Dexter White was appointed executive director of the International Monetary fund, J. Edgar Hoover bullied Truman until White was forced to resign. The IMF became a coercive device for impoverishment rather than a tool for progress. 

J. Edgar Hoover had helped bring about a new order with an expanded “intelligence community” around Allen Dulles, the British royal family’s Round Table faction and its Wall Street partners. 

There was a division of labor. The FBI fed witchhunts by Congressional committees, by President Truman, by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and by the young California Congressman Richard M. Nixon. The CIA and British Intelligence jointly overthrew foreign democratic governments, promoted ugliness and banality in the arts, and pushed a drug culture. 

The criminal Mafia came to be an extension of both FBI and CIA. Both deployed Cuban émigré terrorists, and a military faction with a hatred of American ideals was on the Dulles-Hoover team. CIA and FBI shared ownership of American leftist movements, castrating them, and both agencies ran counter-gangs against real dissenters. 

Both CIA and FBI engaged full-time in falsifying history, an absolute requirement for success in perpetrating the biggest crimes. 

This has often been quite crude. 

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, kept a detailed daily diary as an insider in the Roosevelt Administration. He gave his papers to the National Archives, and in 1951 was talking of publishing the diaries. 

The leader of the FBI team that Hoover dispatched to handle this problem later gave this narrative to Hoover biographer Curt Gentry: 

“. .. There were five of us, and we were all sworn to absolute secrecy. We even left the Washington field office by various devious routes. And we’d go in at different times so no one at the National Archives would know five agents were in that room. And we were the only ones who had a key . . . . We literally went through the diary with scissors, cutting out any references which would be unfavorable to Mr. Hoover or the FBI . ...” The pages were then retyped and renumbered so that there would be no indication that anything was missing . .. . What they left behind for the historians who followed was a history of the New Deal years as approved by J. Edgar Hoover.21

 Warren Commission delivers its report. Congressman Hale Boggs (on the right) saw its fraud, sparked a real prosecution, and denounced Hoover’s Gestapo.

Part V: 

Treason as the 

Deepest Moral Challenge 

Following Franklin Roosevelt’s death, America was to be purged of the Revolutionary moral qualities thought dangerous by the ruling London-Wall Street axis. Hoover’s FBI supplied all the fuel for the Inquisition’s fire. 

Soviet Russia and the states it ruled in divided Europe suffered under Communist secret police regimes, a fact recognized by patriots and transnational oligarchs alike. Here was the background and pretext for the nightmare induced by Hoover and his clients. 

Betrayal was their strategy: under terror of denunciation, a man would betray himself and his friends, would falsely confess or falsely accuse to escape the fire. After all, wasn’t there a great deal of truth in what the interrogator said about the Soviets? Few souls were great enough to point to the historic betrayal of the United States that was before everyone’s eyes. 

Albert Einstein’s open letter 22 to persecuted teacher William Frauenglass, asking thinkers to refuse cooperation and go to jail and ruin rather than betray their country, shamed many and sparked a fight. Hoover’s fury was heightened by Einstein’s outspoken defense of African Americans fighting racial persecution, a movement just then beginning to grow. 

John F. Kennedy entered the Presidency committed to substitute for the Cold War trap a “grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West,” against “the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” Initially paralyzed by the ploys of opposed strategy-makers, Kennedy learned in the White House how he could accomplish the goals he had sought since he had served FDR, his wartime Commander-in Chief and Presidential model. 

He began to restore industry, to pioneer space exploration, to inspire anti-colonial leaders and to offer the Soviets a path for both sides to escape the trap.23 

The rising Black civil rights movement just then gained unprecedented White support. That this movement and Martin Luther King’s leadership could give JFK’s Presidency powerful new potential, was conveyed to him by his brother Robert Kennedy—the Attorney General and constitutionally the boss of J. Edgar Hoover, who despised and feared him. John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas November 22, 1963. 

The FBI proclaimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer. Oswald was murdered two days later, before he could be tried. Hoover sent a Justice Department official to Dallas to shut down local police investigation. The FBI scooped up and secreted away evidence about Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby. President Lyndon Johnson appointed a Commission (including Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA Director) which certified that nothing had happened except that a lone nut had killed the President. 

The old FDR Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana was a member of that Warren Commission. Jack Ruby’s intelligence agency connections disturbed him; he suspected that Oswald’s background had been falsified and records forged. 

In 1965 Rep. Boggs told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that Oswald could not have fired the fatal shots. With Boggs’ encouragement, Garrison began the only law enforcement prosecution of the President’s murder. 

Assassination suspects probed by Garrison had flagrant FBI and CIA backgrounds. Guy Bannister, former Special Agent in Charge of Chicago Office, a reputed assassination planner, and CIA contract pilot David Ferrie together ran Oswald as a patsy. Bannister deployed former FBI agent I.P. Nitschke and three CIA men. Garrison formally charged Clay Shaw, a New Orleans partner in the Dulles-British MI6 joint international joint murder apparatus, as an assassination planner. Justice department attorney Walter Sheridan betrayed Attorney General Robert Kennedy and directed the slanders destroying Garrison’s case. 

A cyclone of confetti, an industry of conspiracy theories, went up to overawe the simple but terrifying necessity for considering what had happened to the nation, and what must be done about it. 

Martin Luther King survived the FBI’s long war to destroy him; he did not break when the FBI sent his family a surveillance tape with the demand that he kill himself. When he fought to pull the country out of Vietnam, out of the Anglo-American permanent war policy, he was shot to death. James Earl Ray confessed to avoid execution, then recanted. 

Robert Kennedy, the clear favorite to succeed Johnson as President, was shot to death while campaigning soon afterwards. Sirhan Sirhan confessed to the murder, but later recanted and said he had no recollection of having confessed. 

With the Kennedys and King gone, Richard Nixon took the Presidency. 

Hale Boggs called on Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell to have the courage to fire J. Edgar Hoover. Boggs “accused Mr. Hoover and the bureau of tapping the telephones of members of Congress and of stationing agents on college campuses to spy on students and faculty members. He said these were ‘the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo.’”24 

The following year the private airplane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared without a trace. The FBI later subjected Congress to a provocateur witch-hunt called ABSCAM, the members cooperating and implicating each other in fear of their careers. 

The nation, and the Congress as an institution, were supine by the time of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and have remained in moral paralysis ever since through the evolution of the “anti-terror” chaos. 

Now the financial superstructure has dissolved under quadrillions of dollars in speculation. At present, the Anglo-Americans are generating a fast-developing crisis, against and all around Russia, that threatens to devolve into a nuclear war. 

China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa (the BRICS nations) have associated as the core for a rescue strategy of vast Twenty-First Century industrial and infrastructure progress. The old British imperial view, governing the United States, is that even the greatest conceivable tragedy is preferable to an overwhelming world majority of Asians and Africans, scientifically and economically advanced and leading world opinion against a de-industrialized West. 

The BRICS have asked the United States to join them. 

This country was the originator of the inventive and moral conceptions that gave rise to man’s greatest power over nature, a power that will save us all if its progress is allowed to resume. 

Reflecting on that beautiful legacy, and how it was subdued, will help us decide to fight for its return. 

https://thementalmilitia.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/HOOVER-FBI-and-AngloAmerican-ARTICLE-Sept-15-2015.pdf

footnotes

1. Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p. 29.

2. April 1908 Hearings before Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations, Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1910 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1909. 

3. Theodore Roosevelt Letter to House Speaker Joseph Cannon, April 30, 1908, quoted by Roosevelt himself in his Jan. 4, 1909 Special Message to Congress

4. Jan. 4, 1909 Roosevelt Special Message. 

5. Aaron Stockham, “Lack of Oversight: The Relationship Between Congress and the FBI, 1907-1975” (2011). Paper 111.
6. Anthony Read and David Fisher, Colonel Z: The Life and Times of a Master of Spies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), p. 109.

7. Ibid. p. 103. 

8. Alfred W. McCoy, op. cit, p. 299 .

9. Reed and Fisher, op. cit. p. 109. Dansey would go on to become de facto head of MI6 for decades into World War Two, through his control of files and of all movements in and out of Britain.

10. Officers of the British army occupying the South during the American Revolution, and Americans loyal to the Crown, established the Scottish Rite inside America, countering the Masonic faction of Franklin, Washington and Lafayette. See Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America, from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman (Kindle edition), chapter 10

11. Ralph Van Deman, The Final Memorandum (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1988), p. 72. 

12. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922) pp. 128-129.

13. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), p. 1. 

14. Christian Science Monitor, August 29, 1930, p. 3.

15. Washington Post, June 11, 1930, p. 1. 

16. He attacked the Panama actions of his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and the “sterile” Dollar Diplomacy policy that had brought us “fear and ridicule,” as a betrayal of our Revolutionary heritage; see FDR’s “Our Foreign Policy, A Democratic View,” Foreign Affairs, July 1928.

17. Hearings of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice, January 19-March 3, 1921; memo on page 14. A Boston Federal court had already ruled in June, 1920 that the Palmer Justice Department had itself created radical units. Judge George W. Anderson stated, “What does appear, beyond reasonable doubt, is that the Government owns and operates some part of the Communist Party.”

18. Campaign Address at Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 20, 1932. 

19. New York Times, March 1, 1933, p. 2.

20. Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 1936, “G-Man Hoover Wins His Fight on Espionage ... Morgenthau Regrets,” p. 1.

21. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton & Co., 1991), pp. 389-390. 

22. New York Times, June 12, 1953, p. 1, 9.

23. see Anton Chaitkin, “John F. Kennedy vs. the Empire,” Executive Intelligence Review, September 6, 2013.

24. New York Times, April 6, 1971, “Boggs Demands That Hoover Quit,” p. 1.