An FBI 'reign of terror' with 'Deep Throat' to blame

Today's FBI, according to its director Robert S. Mueller III, "continues to reflect and embody its motto - Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity. It is a motto emblazoned on the FBI seal," he said in a recent speech at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. And "there is no shortage of heroes in the FBI," he added, "heroes whose stories may never be told." Well, I have a story to tell about an FBI hero, Mr. Mueller, a story even you may not be aware of, and it's not very pretty. Our "hero" was Harry J. Morgan, a rising young star in the FBI hierarchy who, in 1970, was special agent in charge of the San Francisco bureau, the nation's fourth largest FBI office. He'd also flown combat missions as a B-17 navigator during World War II and, as a G-man, led squads that captured two of the Ten Most Wanted criminals, one in Miami, Fla., and the other in Covington, Ky.But, as Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald indelibly wrote: "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy." Unfortunately, in the case of Harry Morgan, so will I. And the protagonist of this ill-fated episode was none other than W. Mark Felt, the Deep Throat informer of Watergate infamy, and his role as the FBI's "chief goon."Told here for the first time and carrying all the trappings of a film noir, this pre-Watergate tragedy recounts Felt's sacking of his FBI colleague, the treachery of a press club member, a cat-and-mouse struggle for a reel-to-reel tape, the intervention of the U.S. attorney general, a suicide that left a family devastated and -- most deplorable -- the failure of the FBI to right an agonizing wrong.Felt, then the No. 2 man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, retired a few years ago to Santa Rosa, Calif. Although now reported to be in fragile health at age 95, he is still hailed as a hero in helping to bring down the Richard Nixon presidency. Ironically, he's also been cast as a villain for playing the same role. But, before we canonize him or castigate him, perhaps we should look into the San Francisco affair and his role in what FBI agents called the "goon squad," an inspection team charged with searching every FBI field office for errors, lax discipline and infractions of the many rules set down by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover."Operating under the direct supervision of the director, ... the chief inspector was both feared and respected," Felt wrote in his 2006 book, "A G-Man's Life." "There were enough serious matters to report to satisfy Hoover's appetite for disciplinary action."John O'Connor, a San Francisco attorney and confidant of the Felt family, described Felt's job more candidly: "Retired FBI agents referred to the 'ice water' in Mark Felt's veins and said he was 'very unpopular' and 'not widely liked.' Mark tried his best to enforce the rules without ruining careers unnecessarily," O'Connor said in an epilogue to Felt's book. "Nobody questioned that he got the reign of terror right. Supervisors recalled the icy hostility of a Mark Felt grilling, or the trademark sneer he wore while striding through a local office."But did he ruin a career unnecessarily? Sneer or not, in September 1970, Felt strode through the office of Harry Morgan and the destruction began. Morgan, a 47-year-old career G-man, had arrived in May and informed me he was No. 3 in line to succeed Hoover.I'd met Harry at the San Francisco Press Club and, as the club's vice president, invited him to participate in an upcoming "celebrity roast" of well-known criminal attorney Jake "The Master" Ehrlich. Initially reluctant to participate, Harry agreed, however, when I assured him the affair was off-the-record because of a long-standing tradition that when a guest spoke behind Tombstone, a reclining Black Cat statuette, the event was never reported by the media.The Ehrlich dinner included such high-powered participants as San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, Police Chief Al Nelder and the ubiquitous Sally Stanford, former bordello-madam-turned-politician. The dialogue was 100-percent satire and, like gridiron shows by press clubs across the country, a left-handed tribute to an honored guest. Morgan performed his part soberly and good-naturedly. And, for the club's archives, the show was tape-recorded.The huge success of the event belied the deep threat that was to follow. It began to materialize a few days later when Morgan, his voice hushed and almost panicky, called me from his office to say that someone from the press club had sent an anonymous letter to Hoover stating that he (Morgan) had gotten drunk in front of 200 people at the press club and made a fool of himself. I was dumbfounded. "That's a complete lie!" I said. "We both know that!""The No. 2 FBI man is here in my office," Morgan whispered. "If he gets hold of that tape, my career is ruined."I told Morgan that the tape was secure. I called press club manager George Brown from my desk at the San Francisco Examiner and advised him that "if an FBI man shows up and asks for the Ehrlich tape, under no circumstance do you give it to him.""You can count on it," Brown said. Several days later he called back and said an FBI man had indeed stopped by and asked for the tape but he didn't give it to him. "I just loaned it to him and he made a copy," Brown added. "The original is back here in the safe."I could feel a world crumbling as I dropped the phone. Several days later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Robert E. Gebhardt, 46, had been named the new head of the FBI office. Morgan, the story said, "was ordered to Dallas as a special agent after being head of the San Francisco office for only five months. No explanation was given either here or in Washington as to why Morgan was being transferred."The humiliation for Morgan and his family was devastating. Harry took the demotion and dramatic drop in salary heroically, subsequently winning a number of citations for his work in Dallas. But, as he later told his daughter, Ann, now a Cincinnati attorney, Felt "would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, even if it meant the ruination of anyone who stood in his way."I wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst spelling out the whole shameful spectacle. By this time, Hoover had died and Nixon had appointed as acting director L. Patrick Gray III, described by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward as "a political hack." Gray's appointment was "all the more shocking," Woodward writes in 'The Secret Man,' "because Felt had concluded he (Felt) was the logical successor to Hoover."In his letter to me, Kleindienst said he had instructed Gray to carefully review the matter with a view to correcting any injustice which may have occurred. "I am also sure that Mr. Gray will fairly and carefully evaluate this situation," he added. I was elated. But if Gray did indeed "fairly and carefully evaluate the situation" we'll never know. Obviously he took no action and that, apparently, was the end of the matter as far as the FBI was concerned. Harry Morgan retired in 1976 and took a vice president's job at a plant in Cincinnati. In September of that year, an attorney friend of the Morgan family telephoned me that Harry had taken his own life -- by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage in Cincinnati. The suicide, to my knowledge, has never been reported by the FBI.Did Felt's ambition to succeed Hoover have anything to do with the sacking of Morgan? O'Connor doesn't think so. "His bark was worse than his bite," he told me. "He tried to keep people in line through fear." O'Connor thinks Felt was a hero but Woodward isn't sure. "I don't know what heroes are," he told NBC-TV's Tom Brokaw. But, "I will forever be grateful to W. Mark Felt," he says at the closing of his book.Well, the tragedy's been written. The San Francisco press club ceased to exist several years ago. The anonymous letter writer, perhaps the real villain of this piece, has never been identified. And there are many questions left unanswered: If the FBI is, arguably, the most effective criminal investigative agency in the world, why didn't Felt pursue his investigation more thoroughly? Why didn't he talk to me about the Ehrlich dinner? All he relied on was a trumped up letter from a vindictive press club member. And how would history have treated Harry Morgan if I hadn't asked him to participate in an off-the-cuff dinner -- prophetically behind a black cat named Tombstone?The FBI, as Mueller pointed out, is all about Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity. It's also about time -- a time for the FBI to remove this blot from its escutcheon by (1) apologizing to the Morgan family, (2) reinstating Harry Morgan (posthumously) to his rightful position in the FBI hierarchy and (3) reimbursing the Morgan family for lost wages because of Felt's infamy.E-mail Dick Alexander at dpalex(at)comcast.net.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)