A Spooky Conversation With a J. Edgar Hoover Defender

I spent a typical DC Monday listening to a former Director of Counterintelligence justifying Hoover's war on the civil right movement as a well-intention response to the Soviet menace.

Having lived in Washington, DC for roughly a decade, there are many things about the city I have come to love. Chief amongst them is how walkable my neighborhood is.

One thing that I do not love about my city of residence is that one can attend a panel convened by an organization named after an architect of mass surveillance, be subjected to bizarre conspiracy theories about journalist Julian Assange, and learn about how Hoover’s FBI were just good people concerned about how Soviet manipulation of the civil rights movement would tear our social fabric asunder.

On the evening of December 5, 2022, I attended a panel of the Michael Hayden Center discussing whether Assange is a “modern day journalist” or “techno spy” (I have to confess, I am still uncertain what a “techno spy” is).

Defending Rights & Dissent @RightsDissent

A lot got lost in the Hayden Center Assange event. But @ChipGibbons89 boiled the debate down to the core issue: "Does the American people have a right to know this information?"

I was there to cover the event on behalf of The Dissenter, a newsletter focusing on whistleblower issues. The Dissenter is curated by Kevin Goszstola, the best journalist covering the use of the Espionage Act to silence journalists, their sources, and whistleblowers. Kevin has done remarkable courtroom reporting on both the Chelsea Manning court-martial and Assange’s extradition hearing in the UK.

My report on the evening is up on The Dissenter. It was truly a wild affair. My biggest take away was that while Assange’s lawyer was anxious to talk about DOJ’s case against his client, Assange’s detractors preferred to talk about anything but that. Apparently, even those who want to see Assange locked away in a dungeon can’t really defend what the Department of Justice is doing.

The article is free to read, but if you can afford it, I highly recommend becoming a paid subscriber to The Dissenter.

My time with the Hayden Center was…spooky. It started when the event’s director, a former CIA chief of staff, made it clear he knew who I was. He had seen my name on “the list.” “A black list,” I asked, only half joking. No! He always reads the list of names of everyone attending. Shortly after, he replied to a tweet of mine announcing I was covering the event for The Dissenter, from the Hayden Center’s official twitter account.

Hayden Center @mvhaydencenter

@ChipGibbons89 @kgosztola Nice meeting you tonight.

Maybe he was just being friendly and I am just being paranoid! Perhaps, he is a big fan of The Dissenter and wanted to make sure I got A-List treatment. But the whole series of exchanges felt…spooky.

But the most frightening part of the evening had to be the conversation I had with one of the panelists at the reception afterwards. As I recount in my piece for The Dissenter, Holden Triplett was the panelist with the most off the wall remarks. Triplett was an FBI agent for 15 years and served as Director of Counter Intelligence for the National Security Council. He currently runs a private consulting firm made up of former FBI agents that offers risk management and investigative services to private businesses. Coincidently, Triplett frequently writes about the threat Chinese economic espionage poses to corporate America.

Triplett’s comments to me after the panel were absolutely stunning. Here’s how I summarized them in The Dissenter

When I approached, I discovered Triplett was having a heated conversation about the Steele Dossier and the application for a warrant against Carter Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He told the two audience members they were engaged in “Russian disinformation.”

I mentioned to Triplett that the FBI had undeniably failed to follow its own internal procedures when applying for the Page warrant, and I brought up that those procedures were put in place, because in September 2000 the FBI confessed to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had misled them about 75 separate surveillance applications.

The FBI was caught lying on FISA applications. The Bureau was allowed to self-regulate, and then agents failed to follow their own regulations. I asked Triplett if this represented a pattern of abuse of power and lack of accountability.

Thankfully, Triplett did not accuse me of Kremlin talking points, but he disagreed. There was intense oversight of the FBI, he contended, and many FBI agents have gone to jail or lost their jobs (only two FBI agents have been convicted for civil liberties violations, neither was sentenced to jail time, and both were pardoned by President Ronald Reagan).

He then asked me if I knew how the FBI conducted national security wiretaps before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed.

"Illegally," Triplett said. But only because there was no other choice. Triplett further maintained that the FBI could not have applied for warrants because the Soviets would have figured out they were after them.

This was shocking. Also, despite his absolute confidence, Triplett was wrong about the history of wiretapping.

From 1934 to the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which created judicial warrants for criminal wiretaps, all wiretap evidence was inadmissible in federal court. The Department of Justice decided that since national security wiretaps did not gather evidence to be used in court they were not prohibited.

A process by which the Attorney General would approve them was created. For example, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved a wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr., not to determine if he committed a crime, but to decide whether he was being influenced by Communists.

Triplett denied all this history, and even stated incorrectly that the wiretap against King was not a national security wiretap. He then brought up the fact that his father was an FBI agent during this time. We had to avoid a narrative that treated men like his father and Hoover as a “gestapo,” they were good and honest men trying to help the country. They just needed the tools that were necessary.

I reminded Triplett of the Church Committee’s conclusion that the Bureau's abuses stemmed from their belief that they had a role in “maintaining the social order” and that they were “guardians of the status quo.”

That’s right, Triplett replied, before insisting that the Soviet Union had incited racial discord in the US by manipulating the civil rights movement. The FBI feared the social fabric of American society was unraveling. He made clear that many of the FBI’s actions against civil rights activists were bad, but repeated some of the worst Hoover-era disinformation in order to make clear they had pure motives.

Also, I mentioned the FBI's loose guidelines for surveillance in 2022. Given the FBI cannot tell civil right movements from Soviet influence or terrorism, thought all protesters were dangerous anarchists, and viewed all supporters of Palestinian rights as criminals, doesn't granting them too much power open the way for the agent’s own political bias to play a role in who they target.

No, Triplett answered. There were many good social movements, and the country benefited from them. However, Triplett argued that many protests are motivated by foreign influence designed to incite discord. The FBI has trouble distinguishing between legitimate protests and those inspired by foreign influence. And it was the FBI’s job to find out.

If someone had told me I had fallen into a time warp and gone back to 1962 I would have believed them. But here I was, in the year of 2022, speaking to someone who had one of the top counter intelligence positions from 2017-2018.

What can I say, it was just another Monday evening in our nation’s capital.

And it further cemented my impressions of FBI counter intelligence efforts.

Chip Gibbons @ChipGibbons89

Declassified FBI documents previously marked "secret" as they allegedly involved the collection of foreign counter intelligence. All of these supposed foreign counter intelligence documents detail lawful, First Amendment protected activity. All post Church Committee, pre-9/11.