Wilkinson vs. the FBI : Surveillance Case Sheds Light on McCarthy Era

The first hint that anything was amiss was a robbery on a Saturday afternoon in 1969 at the headquarters of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) in Los Angeles.

Four armed men, alternately speaking Spanish and English, locked a frightened office worker in the bathroom and ordered the building watchman to lie down under a rug, threatening to “blow his brains out” if he did not.

The men then burst through the office door with a sledgehammer and scattered the contents of the files across a table top. The file marked “correspondence” disappeared.

At NCARL, an organization committed to seeing the House Committee on Un-American Activities abolished--and accustomed to trouble in an era when left-wing groups came under frequent attack--no one thought much about the robbery.

It wasn’t until four years later that NCARL officials began noticing similarities between their own robbery and a series of White House-directed political break-ins during the same period--in particular, the 1971 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office only a few miles away by a band of Cubans hired by Watergate conspirators G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.

NCARL’s executive director, Frank Wilkinson, wrote Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and demanded to know if there was a connection. There wasn’t, Cox wrote back, but Cox said he was nonetheless intrigued enough about the robbery to turn over Wilkinson’s letter to the FBI.

Thus began more than 10 years of inquiries and litigation that eventually convinced Wilkinson that the FBI, charged with investigating the robbery, had perhaps committed it.

A wave of documents that began flowing in from FBI offices all over the country revealed that Wilkinson had been a target of FBI surveillance for nearly 30 years.

Probed Further

His work promoting public housing in Los Angeles, his speeches at college campuses and service clubs, his conversations with friends, bank deposits--all had been documented, analyzed, assigned reference numbers and deposited in FBI files.

After Wilkinson’s initial inquiries, the FBI admitted that it had accumulated 4,500 pages of surveillance reports documenting the milestones of his life. Then, when Wilkinson probed further, the agency admitted it had as many as 12,000 pages.

Now, eight years after Wilkinson first filed suit for violation of his constitutional rights, the FBI has entered into a partial settlement under which it will turn over to the national archives up to 132,000 pages of surveillance documents on Wilkinson and his political activities.

The settlement, recently approved by U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima, substantially concludes what many believe is the last major chapter in the FBI’s counterintelligence program, under which the government conducted a secret domestic spying campaign against a variety of U.S. organizations thought to be violent or subversive.

Although there have been numerous lawsuits in the last decade challenging the controversial program that officially terminated in 1971, few have so clearly captured the essence of what has come to be known as the McCarthy Era in American politics.

Moreover, none have so firmly documented the close links that existed during those years between the FBI under former Director J. Edgar Hoover and the red-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Page by page, the files released so far document the FBI’s efforts to discredit Wilkinson, a Los Angeles community activist who became a national leader in the movement to abolish the House committee, by planting news stories about Wilkinson’s alleged communist affiliations, setting up counter-demonstrations at his public appearances and mailing anonymous “poison pen” letters to NCARL’s financial supporters.

One of First Convicted

The documents establish that the FBI knew the precise time and location of a planned assassination attempt against Wilkinson in 1964 and failed to warn him about it. (The FBI says it alerted local law enforcement authorities, but the threat was never carried out.)

And when Wilkinson became one of the first to be convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer the House committee’s questions about his political affiliations, the files show that the FBI contacted an undisclosed source in the office of the U.S. Supreme Court about the progress of his case--raising questions about the agency’s influence on the nation’s highest court.

“I think this case is very unusual in terms of the size of the file and the intensity of the surveillance, and the apparent personal interest that Hoover and high-level FBI agents had in Frank’s activities is really quite unusual,” said Paul Hoffman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which, with the law firm of Loeb & Loeb (working on a pro bono basis), represented NCARL in the FBI litigation.

“Hoover seemed to want to know what Frank was doing, as though this one person was calling into question the government’s authority to hunt for subversives in the way they wanted to,” Hoffman said. “It’s amazing that the FBI would pay that much attention to one First Amendment organizer.”

Wilkinson, now 73, never had the makings of a public enemy. In fact, he had his sights on the Methodist ministry when he left UCLA in 1936 and headed on a tour of the Midwest and the Holy Land before beginning his graduate work.

All that changed, though, when the fraternity boy from Beverly Hills, son of a prominent Republican physician, came with a shock upon the slums of Chicago and the sight of beggars on the church steps of Jerusalem.

“I had always been thrilled with the idea of ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ ” Wilkinson said. “But what I encountered was hundreds and hundreds of beggars at the Church of the Nativity begging for alms, and I just couldn’t believe it--here, at the place Christ was born, here, 2,000 years later, there were still beggars. I stayed three months.”

By the time he got home, all thoughts of the Methodist ministry were behind him, and within a few years he was managing the first integrated housing project for the poor on the West Coast, in Watts, and producing a film documenting conditions in Los Angeles slums.

It was a troubled time for the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, for which Wilkinson soon became chief information officer. Several years before the courts banned discrimination in housing, the fledgling agency was battling a decidedly chilly public for construction of integrated housing projects in comfortable white neighborhoods such as Mar Vista, San Pedro, Rose Hills and the San Fernando Valley.

Los Angeles’ conservative business establishment tended to view the authority’s $110-million plan to construct 10,000 low-income housing units outside the slums with suspicion. “Creeping socialism” was a favorite term used by those who believed that the 25,000 residents living in dilapidated housing between Alameda and Main streets north of Washington should remain there.

But the biggest battle came when the Housing Authority began in 1952 to condemn property in Chavez Ravine north of downtown--eventual home of Dodger Stadium--for 3,500 new public housing units.

Landowners in the area dug in, and a long series of well-publicized court battles ensued.

Called as Expert Witness

Wilkinson, who by then could identify every blighted neighborhood in the city, was called as an expert witness to testify on behalf of the authority. Midway through the proceedings, after the landowners’ attorney had exhausted all questions about the property, Wilkinson was asked to name all the organizations, political and otherwise, to which he belonged.

Wilkinson refused, citing “personal conscience,” and court was abruptly recessed for the day. The incident prompted both the City Council and the Los Angeles Times to demand an investigation of communist infiltration in the Housing Authority.

“This is the man who is head of the public information department of the City Housing Authority,” Councilman Ed J. Davenport said at a council meeting, after the court hearing, “and who has been indoctrinating our schoolchildren with a phony film--an absolute travesty--about supposed Los Angeles slums.”

Wilkinson and two other Housing Authority employees targeted as communist agents--despite annual loyalty oaths all three had signed over the years--lost their jobs. Wilkinson’s wife was suspended from her job as a schoolteacher.

‘Went Up in Flames’

“The world just went up in flames,” recalled Wilkinson, who spent the next 11 months looking for a job. He finally accepted an offer to work at a Pasadena department store as a janitor on the graveyard shift--with the proviso that he have no contact with other employees and not publicly disclose that the store had hired him.

His church school superintendent battled with the YMCA board to assure that Wilkinson’s three children could attend their regular summer camp that year. The board finally relented, but only if someone other than Wilkinson attended camp church services with the children, and only if Wilkinson could find another doctor to give them their check-up--the regular camp doctor refused.

“At that point, I broke down and I cried, and I said I accepted it. I bought it--they wanted to go to camp so badly,” Wilkinson said.

It was then that Wilkinson got together with other civil liberties organizers throughout the country and founded the Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, the predecessor of NCARL.

Refused to Answer

Mailing fliers, collecting donations and making speeches at college campuses and service clubs across the country, Wilkinson eventually was called to testify before the House committee itself. According to Wilkinson’s lawyers, he and integrationist Carl Braden became the first two men to refuse to answer questions on First Amendment grounds and be sentenced to prison.

In a landmark 5-4 decision, with Justices Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan and Hugo L. Black arguing in passionate dissent that the committee had subpoenaed Wilkinson because of his activities to disband it--the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions.

The FBI had been watching Wilkinson and his organization since 1942.

The first documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI was urging Wilkinson’s departure from the Housing Authority almost from the beginning.

Between 1977 and 1978, NCARL received a total of 5,000 pages of documents, many of them partially or totally blacked out, which began to give a sketchy picture of the extent of the FBI’s surveillance of Wilkinson and the organization throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.

University presidents were contacted in an attempt to cancel Wilkinson’s appearances. When they refused--as did former UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr and former Vice Chancellor Adrian Kragen, suggesting instead that the FBI simply send someone to debate Wilkinson--Hoover responded with irritation:

“I am absolutely opposed to this crowd of bleeding hearts at Berkeley using FBI to ‘get off the hook,’ ” Hoover scribbled on one memorandum. “I know Kerr is no good and I doubt Kragen is.”

When Wilkinson and NCARL filed their lawsuit against the FBI in 1980, on behalf of 1,800 regular donors to the group who had also been watched because of their support, the documents they got in response made it even clearer that the FBI had been conducting a concerted campaign to disrupt and discredit the organization.

Representatives of veterans’ and even American Nazi organizations were contacted to conduct counter-demonstrations during Wilkinson’s appearances. In one case, on a hot summer day, a college janitor was persuaded to turn on the furnace during a meeting, according to NCARL’s Northern California director, who has catalogued the documents.

A staff writer for the Mike Douglas show was contacted and provided with a list of possible questions to ask Wilkinson for his planned appearance on the show.

Trumped-Up Groups

In some cases, the FBI rented post office boxes under assumed names and mailed out letters from trumped-up organizations purporting to reveal “the truth” about Wilkinson to his erstwhile supporters.

The disruption efforts appeared to be paying off, at least by the FBI’s own estimates. A 1962 memo noted that a meeting featuring Wilkinson at NCARL’s Chicago affiliate had drawn an attendance of only 125, collecting donations of $165, compared to an appearance six months earlier when 220 showed up and donated $425.

Perhaps even more disturbing, NCARL officials say, is evidence that the FBI was responsible for at least one burglary of the organization’s office in Chicago, unauthorized wiretaps and regular reviews of NCARL’s bank records.

The FBI has admitted the Chicago burglary, but has denied involvement in any other NCARL break-ins, including the 1969 robbery in Los Angeles. The agency has also denied monitoring the organization’s phone lines, though a spokesman said it was likely some NCARL members were monitored when they telephoned other left-wing organizations that were being wiretapped.

Most Disturbing Documents

A series of memoranda regarding the status of Wilkinson’s contempt of Congress conviction are, to NCARL’s lawyers, among the most disturbing of the documents turned over so far.

One indicates that Hoover inquired whether “it is possible to expedite” the date on which Wilkinson was to report to prison to serve his sentence.

A later memo indicates that the bureau was provided a copy of Wilkinson’s petition for rehearing of the case by someone on the court whose name was blacked out. The same source advised the FBI that it would take at least a month to act on the petition.

“To us, it is exemplary of one of two things, either one of which would be a very serious problem,” said Douglas Mirell, the lead lawyer on the case for Loeb & Loeb.

“Either it is an example of misuse of the Freedom of Information Act to withhold the identity of somebody who is merely a clerical employee and who was providing no more nor less information to the FBI than that employee would do in the ordinary course of business, or there is a more insidious possibility, and that is that the FBI had a source, a confidential source, operating within the U.S. Supreme Court who was providing information about what was happening to the case during its processing by the court.

‘Very Scary Possibility’

“A possibility that is raised by this document, a very scary possibility, is that there were . . . communications from the bureau to the court in an attempt to influence in some way the outcome of the decision,” Mirell said.

R. Joseph Sher, the Justice Department lawyer who has represented the FBI in the case, scoffed at that possibility and said the name was deleted merely to protect a clerical employee’s privacy.

In any case, Sher said, the FBI was conducting the investigation because it had information--later apparently disproved--that Wilkinson had ties to the Communist Party and as such constituted a threat to national security. Some NCARL members have admitted past ties to the Communist Party. “The national committee was investigated because there was testimony that a lot of its principals were connected with the Communist Party, and in those days, that was what one did, if one was the FBI and had such information. . . . We look at this whole area differently today as a society than we did then.”

War Over Deletions

The NCARL litigation in recent years has become a war over deletions, with motion after motion filed before Judge Tashima challenging the government’s frequent redactions from the documents handed over. In 1983, the FBI handed over 3,000 pages that had been totally blacked out except for identifying numbers.

The dispute over redactions has resulted in a number of important rulings from Tashima over the extent of such protections, in one case limiting that government’s ability to claim such exemptions, and in another, ordering the government to turn over unredacted all documents going back more than 30 years. Both rulings are on appeal.

At the same time, the rulings have not all gone in NCARL’s favor. In fact, Tashima dismissed most of the organization’s claims for monetary damages, ruling that the lawsuit should have been filed much earlier, when Wilkinson first knew, or should have known, about the extent of the FBI’s surveillance.

Under the settlement, the organization retains the right to receive damages if the documents reveal that any surveillance occurred after 1975, when the federal Privacy Act went into effect, four years after the NCARL investigation officially shut down.

Full Impact of Surveillance

In addition, all of the documents on NCARL will be removed from the FBI’s files and turned over to the national archives for review by future scholars, a move seen as unprecedented among lawyers in the field. Only then, lawyers in the case say, may the full impact of the FBI’s surveillance come to light.

“It took until 1975 to get (the House committee) abolished,” Mirell said, “and the question has always been kind of a ‘what if?’ What if the FBI had not done what it did to NCARL, what if this individual was not intimidated, what if this meeting was not disrupted, when would HUAC have been abolished but for that activity? It’s one of the great imponderables that obviously we will never have an answer to.”

For Wilkinson, who still speaks throughout the country on what he says is the new repression of the Reagan Administration, the only answer he needs is in the stacks of papers that he frequently likes to pose next to for photographers, papers that document 38 years of his life.

“You know,” he said recently, “I’ve always dreamed of dying and being cremated and having the ashes placed under a redwood tree, or spread out over the ocean. Then this lawsuit came along, and there was something about that title on the legal papers I liked.

“And suddenly, I said to my wife, I said, no way am I going to be cremated. I want to be buried in Forest Lawn. I want the biggest marble monument you can find, and I want it to say, ‘Wilkinson vs. the FBI.’ ”

Times research librarian Peter Johnson contributed to this story.