"Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Interviews Tim Weiner: The Secret History of America's Spooks Interview Highlights You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.' " The American people would know you for what you are - an evil, abnormal beast. "And the poison pen letter read: 'King, look into your heart. "It was a poison pen letter, it was a hate letter it wasn't from anyone in particular, but Martin Luther King and his wife would certainly know the source of the tapes, that it had to be the FBI," says Weiner. Hoover had his intelligence chief bug King's bedroom, and then sent the civil rights leader a copy of the sex recordings his intelligence chief had taken of King - along with an anonymous letter from the FBI. Hoover was intent on planting bugs around civil rights leaders - including King - because he thought communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement, says Weiner. If they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down." "These people were enemies of the state, and in particular Martin Luther King was an enemy of the state. "Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War," he says. Later on, anti-war protesters and civil rights leaders were added to Hoover's list. as an "enemy of the state," says author Tim Weiner. "Hoover denied - at the time and until his death - that he had been the intellectual author of the Red Raids." "When the dust cleared, maybe 1 in 10 was found guilty of a deportable offense," says Weiner. 1, 1920, Hoover sent out the arrest orders, and at least 6,000 people were arrested and detained throughout the country. "From that day forward, he planned a nationwide dragnet of mass arrests to round up subversives, round up communists, round up Russian aliens - as if he were quarantining carriers of typhoid," Weiner says. After a series of anarchist bombings went off across the United States in 1919, Hoover sent five agents to infiltrate the newly formed Communist Party. citizens he suspected were anarchists, radical leftists or communists. Even before he became director of the FBI, Hoover was conducting secret intelligence operations against U.S. Weiner details how Hoover became increasingly worried about communist threats against the United States. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. and he never lost this fear."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Enemies Author Tim Weiner "Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II that America was going to be attacked - that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs. "Reading them is like looking over shoulder and listening to him talk out loud about the threats America faced, how the FBI was going to confront them," he says. Weiner went to the lawyer's office and collected four boxes containing Hoover's personal files on intelligence operations between 19. "And after a stunned silence, I said, 'Yes, yes.' " Would you like them?' " Weiner tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "He said, 'I've just gotten my hands on a Freedom of Information Act request that's 26 years old for J. He also kept secret files on more than 20,000 Americans he deemed "subversive."įour years after Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tim Weiner published Legacy of Ashes, his detailed history of the CIA, he received a call from a lawyer in Washington, D.C. He introduced fingerprinting and forensic techniques to the crime-fighting agency, and pushed for stronger federal laws to punish criminals who strayed across state lines. Edgar Hoover was the first director of the FBI.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |