“I think he did the right thing,” said former president William Clinton, speaking about Felt’s action on CNN’s Larry King Live television show.

An editorial in the June 4 People’s Weekly World, the newspaper expressing the views of the Communist Party USA, was much more exuberant, hailing Felt for “blowing the lid off Richard Nixon’s Watergate crimes.” It concluded: “The Bush White House is simply determined to seek out and destroy any information or source that challenges its drive for power. That is the reason defenders of freedom of the press are standing behind reporters, as well as government and corporate whistleblowers, who expose wrongdoing in high places.”

Such portrayals of Felt as a supposed defender of democratic rights could not be further from the truth.  
 
Felt’s real record
Felt began his career in the FBI’s domestic spy section during World War II, snooping on opponents of the war that the bureau labeled spies or saboteurs. Starting in 1954 Felt served in a half dozen FBI field offices, where among other things he oversaw background checks of workers at the Hanford plutonium plant near Richmond, Washington. In 1962 he was brought back to FBI headquarters and put in charge of training.

As a loyalist to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt rose rapidly, holding positions as assistant to top FBI officials. In 1972 he finally became no. 2 man at the government’s domestic secret police.

Felt was convicted with fellow agent Edward Miller in 1980 for having authorized no less than nine black-bags job at the homes of several residents of New York and New Jersey. These individuals’ crime was that of being relatives or acquaintances of suspected members of the Weather Underground. The FBI charged that members of the group planted bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

Though their convictions carried a maximum 10-years sentence in prison, Felt and Miller received only a slap on the wrist, ordered to pay fines of $5,000 and $3,500, respectively. Both were pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 (see article in this issue).  
 
White House-FBI turf war
Turf war, not noble ideals motivated Felt to rat on the Nixon administration. Felt had already proven to be uncooperative with the White House. In 1971 he refused an Oval Office directive to conduct wiretaps to find the source of leaks about the administration’s national security strategy.

In 1972 the White House was embarrassed by the disclosure of a memo by a lobbyist for the telecommunications giant ITT. It said the Justice Department would drop an investigation of the conglomerate in exchange for the company’s $400,000 contribution to Nixon’s reelection campaign. Hoover assigned investigation of the memo to Felt. When the administration attempted to get the bureau to declare the memo a forgery Felt refused.

Hoover died six weeks before the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate building. Felt was an honorary pall bearer at Hoover’s funeral. Nixon bypassed Hoover’s no. 2 man, however, and appointed Patrick Gray, whom he trusted, as acting director. Felt did not want Nixon to meddle in the FBI’s investigation of Watergate.

Nonetheless Nixon appeared at Felt’s trial as a defense witness. Felt and Miller defended themselves by arguing that the break-in and wiretaps they authorized were justified in the interests of national security. Nixon testified for the defense that presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had authorized such “black-bag jobs.” Nixon even contributed money to Felt’s legal defense fund.

Other witnesses for the defense included attorneys general Herbert Brownell, Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark, John Mitchell, and Richard Kleindienst.

A year prior to his trial, Felt published The FBI Pyramid from the Inside. In this memoir, Felt adamantly defended Hoover, denounced criticisms of the FBI under Hoover’s tenure, and said the Freedom of Information Act of 1974 only served to interfere with the government and helped “criminals.”  
 
SWP suit against FBI
The government’s assertion of its right to conduct the kind of operations Felt oversaw was at the heart of a landmark suit filed by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance against the FBI and other government agencies in 1973. The trial opened April 2, 1981, shortly after Reagan pardoned Felt and Miller. While court proceedings lasted for three months, the case went on for years. A broad public political fight in support for this lawsuit was a major factor in the final victory and set a lasting example of how to defend workers’ rights and political freedoms.

On Aug. 25, 1986, Judge Thomas Griesa ruled for the plaintiffs, finding the FBI guilty of violations of the constitutional rights of the SWP and YSA and of their members and supporters.

Griesa’s ruling detailed several of the FBI’s 57 disruption operations. These included poison-pen letters, malicious articles planted in the press, instances of victimization, covert attempts to get SWP members fired from their jobs, and efforts to disrupt collaboration between the party and Black rights and anti-Vietnam War groups.

Griesa concluded that these government operations were illegal and a violation of the Bill of Rights. He ruled that appeals to “national security”—by the president or anyone else—cannot be used as an excuse to violate the Constitution. “The FBI exceeded any reasonable definition of its mandate and had no discretion to do so,” he said.

Based on these findings, Griesa ordered the government to pay the SWP and YSA $264,000 in damages. (The record of this fight is contained in FBI on Trial.)

This decision codified significant advances in political rights, which the ruling class is now trying to reverse.

The stakes today in the fight against the government’s assault on democratic rights and political freedoms are clearly presented in “Their Transformation and Ours,” the SWP National Committee’s draft political resolution that will be discussed and voted on at the party’s June 9-11 convention in Oberlin, Ohio. The document is published in issue no. 12 of the Marxist magazine New International (see link to New Internationals). It describes the measures the rulers are taking as they prepare to “respond to the resistance the capitalists know will inevitably deepen inside the United States as the consequences of their economic course bear down on workers, farmers, and other working people.”

These measures “range from increased federal centralization of ‘surveillance’ of ‘suspected terrorists’ both at home and abroad, to a de facto national identity card system in the guise of Social Security numbers; from omnipresent ‘security’ controls at airports, in office buildings, and elsewhere, to appeals to report ‘suspicious’ packages in public places or behavior that’s ‘out of the ordinary’ in your apartment building, neighborhood, or on the streets; from curtailment of habeas corpus and even Fifth Amendment protections of the accused and spying on individuals’ library use, book purchases, and bank accounts; to stepped-up targeting of foreign-born residents.”

The decks are being cleared of restraints placed on the secret police as a result of what the working-class movement accomplished in the 1960s and ’70s. “The FBI’s domestic ‘counterterrorism’ work is once again being rapidly expanded,” the resolution explains.

The praise of Felt by liberals and Stalinists as an honorable cop aids the rulers’ drive against political freedoms today. The modern-day pardon of Felt as a “hero” is, as Felt commented about his pardon by Reagan nearly 25 years ago, a “shot in the arm for the intelligence community.”
 
 
Related articles:
How Reagan pardoned FBI crooks  
 
 
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