William C. Sullivan: FBI Director of Domestic Intelligence

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William C. Sullivan: FBI Director of Domestic Intelligence

Postby MinM » Thu Mar 01, 2012 11:30 am

Clint Eastwood’s Dishonest ‘J. Edgar’ | Consortiumnews
November 30, 2011

Much of the controversy around Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar has swirled around screenwriter Lance Black’s depiction of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as a closeted gay man, since Black is a gay writer-director and most of his previous projects featured gay themes.

But even more important in any critical analysis of the movie is Eastwood’s work as director. Because that informs us about why the American film business has come to a point when a mediocre, compromised and dishonest production like this much ballyhooed film gets praised for “being candid” about one of the worst Americans of the 20th Century...

Most of the film’s 137 minute running time consists of five episodes: 1.) Hoover’s relationship with his mother; 2.) His relationship with his assistant Clyde Tolson; 3.) Hoover’s role in the World War I-era Palmer Raids; 4.) The FBI’s role in the Lindbergh child kidnapping case; 5.) The composition of a letter to Martin Luther King in which the FBI implied that he should commit suicide or else the Bureau would blackmail him about his infidelity.

The first two are personal matters of course. But before we get to them, it is interesting to explore how Black deals with the latter three since they are the incidents he uses to elucidate Hoover’s professional career...

Lindbergh Case

Let us now look at the film’s depiction of the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son.

As Black and Eastwood show, the local and state authorities did not want the Bureau involved. But it is also true that Hoover had the opportunity to stake out the meeting at which ransom money was exchanged for information on where the child was being held. Hoover decided not to do so. [Gentry, p. 150]

This turned out to be a mistake since the child was not at the location where the kidnapper’s said he was. He was already dead. And the decomposed body was within five miles of Lindbergh’s home. This discovery finally got the Bureau involved through the orders of the president. And shortly after Congress passed what became known as the Lindbergh Law, making kidnapping a federal offense and giving Hoover jurisdiction.

But this expansion of his authority became a problem since Hoover had great difficulty solving the case: the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann was not made for over two and a half years.

In fact, Hoover always thought that more than one person was involved and that there was likely an inside agent as part of the plot. Hoover first suspected for this role the baby’s nursemaid, Betty Gow, who was the last person to see the infant in the crib and the first to discover his absence. [Lloyd C. Gardner, The Case that Never Dies, p. 32]

Also, unlike what the film shows, Hoover’s certainty about the guilt of Hauptmann was not close to absolute. Indeed, his agents told him that the local authorities had fiddled with the evidence.

We now know today, through the work of Anthony Scaduto in his 1977 book Scapegoat, that the prosecution had employment records in their possession that they hid from the defense that made it very difficult to believe that Hauptmann could have driven from New York City (where he was working that day) to New Jersey, the scene of the crime, at the time he was supposed to be there.

Further, the prosecutors even tampered with the start date of Hauptmann’s New York job to make it appear he was not even there on the day of the kidnapping. (For a brief overview of the case, click here)

As Curt Gentry notes, in October 1934, three months before Hauptmann’s trial began, Hoover called a press conference to announce the FBI was withdrawing from the case. [Gentry, p. 162] From then, until Hauptmann’s execution in April 1936, there was a long series of FBI memoranda marking the Bureau’s and Hoover’s doubts about the case.

Agent Leon Turrou, Hoover’s main liaison to the local authorities from the time of the indictment, called the proceedings against Hauptmann “a mockery” of a trial. For instance, one of the main witnesses used to identify the defendant was a Dr. Condon, who met in a cemetery with a man sent to collect the ransom. Yet Condon failed to pick Hauptmann out of a line-up.

And two days after, Condon told Turrou that Hauptmann was not the man he met. The man he met was much heavier, had different eyes, different hair etc. [Ibid, p. 163] Yet, by the time of the trial, someone had changed his mind and he was now positive it was Hauptmann.

Same thing with Charles Lindbergh who only heard the man’s voice in the cemetery. At first, Lindbergh said he could not positively identify the voice as Hauptmann’s. But by the time he took the stand, Lindbergh positively identified it.

A witness who placed Hauptmann near the Lindbergh home was characterized in an FBI memo as “a confirmed liar and totally unreliable.” [Ibid, p. 163]

Hoover himself doubted some of the evidence in the case. For instance as he admitted in a memo of Sept. 24, 1934 — before the trial started — the defendant’s fingerprints did not match “the latent impressions developed on the ransom notes.”

And as Lloyd Garner writes, Hauptmann’s fingerprints were not on the ladder allegedly used to climb to the infant’s window at the Lindbergh home. The local authorities then washed the ladder of all prints and failed to disclose that Hauptmann’s were not there. [Gardner, p. 344]

This is why when Lindbergh praised the FBI for its work on the case, Hoover was not thankful but indignant. [Gentry, p. 163] Of course, the FBI later concealed its doubts and made the case a hallmark of the official tour for propaganda purposes.

Eastwood and Black, again, sell the public the amended version, with both Hoover and Tolson in daily attendance at the trial, which was not the case...

If Black didn’t have an agenda, if he had been interested in who Hoover really was, what he represented, and what his pernicious impact on America really was, he would have shown us a different confrontation, such as the one that went on between Hoover and Director of Domestic Intelligence William Sullivan.

To my knowledge, Sullivan was the only man in the executive offices who ever stood up to Hoover. About a year or two before Hoover died, Sullivan wrote a series of memos criticizing Hoover’s performance as Director on issues like his gross exaggeration of the Communist threat inside the USA, his failure to hire African-American agents, and his failure to enforce civil rights laws. Sullivan also had tired of Hoover’s blackmail surveillance on presidents and began to think the Director was not of sound mind. [Summers, pgs. 397-99]

This culminated in a meeting in Hoover’s office where Sullivan said Hoover should retire. Hoover refused, and it was Sullivan who was forced out of the Bureau. Sullivan later testified before the Church Committee and gave Congress much inside information about Hoover’s illegal operations.

Sullivan once told columnist Robert Novak that if one day he would read about his death in some kind of accident, Novak should not believe it; it would be murder.

In 1977, during the re-investigations of the killings of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Sullivan died in New Hampshire as he was meeting with friends to go deer hunting. Another hunter, with a telescopic sight, mistook Sullivan for a deer and killed him with his rifle.

The book that Sullivan was working on about his 30 years in the FBI was then posthumously published, but reportedly in much expurgated form. He was one of six current or former FBI officials who died in a six-month period in 1977, the season of inquiry into FBI dirty deeds and FBI cover-ups of political assassinations.


If this film had ended with the Sullivan-Hoover feud, it would have told us something about both America and about Hoover. But it would have been dark and truthful. Evidently, Black and Eastwood were not interested in that.

Black’s agenda is pretty clear. Why Eastwood went along with this pastel-colored romance about a man who was a blackmailing monster is difficult to understand. But it proves again, as Pauline Kael explained decades ago, why Clint Eastwood is no artist. Artists don’t compromise. And they don’t falsify.

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/11/30/cl ... t-j-edgar/

Show #554
Original airdate: Nov 27, 2011
Guest: Jim DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, Ira David Wood III
Topics: J. Edgar, RFK, The JFK Assassination Chronology

Play Part One - Jim DiEugenio (47:18) Real Media or MP3 download

*Jim received an award from the Lancer group in Dallas, spoke about Kennedy's foreign policy, a lot of young people there
*J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood's movie, angered Jim, a falsification of the man and his history, by screenwriter Dustin Black
*Concentrates on the Palmer Raids, the Lindbergh Kidnapping case, the letter to MLK in 1963
*Thousands were arrested, without evidence, the ACLU began over this case
*Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh Kidnapping, Hoover mistrusted the evidence, a mockery of justice, changed testimony
*Film has Hoover gung ho against Hauptmann, using FBI technologies to link him to the crime, falsifies Hoover's certainity

*Hoover authorized a letter trying to get King to commit suicide, film concentrates on Hoover wiretaps of King
*Prior to JFK, the FBI had no more than five 'black Agents', each served as a chauffeur or a butler for Hoover
*The FBI never enforced civil rights laws, the FBI intended to derail the entire civil rights movement
*The composite wiretaps tape and letter sent to King's wife, caused King a lot of emotional stress
*Almost none of Hoover reciting the blackmail letter is in the movie, film trys to soften the facts of Hoover's racism

*Leaves out the worst aspects of Hoover's careeer, left out key facts, an agenda, what a PR man would do for Hoover
*Clint Eastwood, has a reputation of being a serious director, 137 minutes, counted two scenes above the pedestrian
*DiCaprio, doesn't capture Hoover's stacatto speech pattern, or malevolence, Tolson is a disaster, Judi Dench
*The climax of the movie is a quarrel between Tolson and Hoover, a fist fight, a kiss, a lover's spat
*Black has an agenda to soften the image of Hoover, bring out the homosexuality, like he's a normal person
*Who Hoover really was. his pernicious impact on America, should have the fight between Hoover and William Sullivan
*William Sullivan was killed by a hunter, he was mistaken for a deer, before testifying about FBI dirty tricks
*Jim saved Len the price of admission, Len questions whether it was actually King on those tapes, may have been faked
*Hoover is a very important figure in the Kennedy case, he covered up the facts, in the assassinations of the 1960s
*Why aren't the media going after Black and Eastwood for distorting the record?, because of the Warren Commission?
*The reviews, no in-depth analysis, the movie ignores Hoover ignoring organized crime until Kennedy came into office
*Hoover put agent provocateurs in the Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, murdered while sleeping, Geronimo Pratt

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black554a.mp3

Dustin Lance Black: Crafting The Story Of 'J. Edgar' : NPR

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2 ... _fa_01.mp3

Wesley Snipes Backs Film About CIA-led MLK Project
Wesley Snipes Backs Film About CIA-led MLK Project

Wesley Snipes is involved in the 1960′s-set thriller “Code Name Zorro,” a biopic of the man who headed up the CIA’s top secret Zorro project designed to destroy Martin Luther King’s credibility.

According to Deadline, the film centers on the final moments in the life of William Sullivan, who’s Zorro project was initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and included tactics such as wiretapping and fraud to set up numerous illegal schemes.

Sullivan intended to air all of the dirty laundry about the project to a journalist, but was killed in a “hunting accident” shortly thereafter.


Justin Stamm penned the script and Snipes has received endorsement from Martin Luther King Jr.’s son, Martin Luther King III.

Snipes will produce, be involved in selecting cast and director, and will likely play a role though which one is presently undetermined...

viewtopic.php?p=370544#p370544

rigorousintuition.ca :: 11/22/63 CIA coup in the USA kills President Kennedy

rigorousintuition.ca :: Hauptmann Murdered by Lindbergh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Sullivan
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