Who killed the FBI DIRECTOR?

Who killed the FBI DIRECTOR?

ANDERSON, Jack was Born in 1922, newsman Jack Anderson first gained national prominence in the late 1940s when he joined Drew Pearson at the Washington Post, helping to produce the nationally syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. Ironically, Anderson owed his position to J. EDGAR HOOVER, who informed Pearson that his former aide (Andrew Older) was a communist. Pearson promptly fired Older and hired Anderson to replace him. Anderson, in turn, became friendly with Senator Joseph McCarthy, funneling information from Pearson’s private files to McCarthy without Pearson’s knowledge. Although forewarned that the files contained unverified allegations, McCarthy quoted the information as factual, thereby losing Anderson’s support. In 1951, after publicly questioning the use of FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) agents to escort McCarthy’s secretary on a visit to Hawaii, Anderson and Pearson were placed on the bureau’s “no contact” list.

Despite that ostracism, the columnists still praised Hoover effusively through the 1960s until the relationship finally soured in 1968, when Pearson and Anderson began to investigate Senator Thomas Dodd, a former G-man and the FBI’s unofficial mouthpiece on Capitol Hill. FBI agents tried to foil that investigation by stealing some of Anderson’s mail, the theft later acknowledged by U.S. Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien. The columnists retaliated with a December 1968 article in True magazine, predicting that America was witnessing “the last days of J. Edgar Hoover.” The piece ascribed Hoover’s “sainthood” to “40 years of planted press notices,” without mentioning that Anderson and Pearson had participated in the charade.

FBI surveillance of Anderson continued into the 1970s, joined by agents of the CENTRAL INTELLI-GENCE AGENCY (CIA), the INTERNAL REVENUE SERV-ICE, and military intelligence. Anderson turned the tables by interviewing Hoover’s neighbors and raiding his garbage cans, reversing the standard FBI “trash cover” to report on Hoover’s favorite brand of soap and liquor. Anderson won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Washington scandals in 1972, prompting members of RICHARD NIXON’s staff (including former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy) to plot Anderson’s assassination. Several methods were discussed, including an LSD-induced car crash and a simulated mugging, before the White House ruled that murder was “too severe a sanction.” Instead, Nixon aides asked Hoover to help them discredit Anderson. Hoover cheerfully agreed, denouncing Anderson as “the lowest form of human being to walk the earth,” a “journalistic prostitute,” and “the top scavenger of all columnists” who would “go lower than dog shit for a story.”

On May 1, 1972, Anderson’s column branded Hoover “the old curmudgeon of law enforcement,” detailing decades of FBI harassment against MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., and others. Furious, Hoover ordered an investigation to identify Anderson’s sources within the bureau, but he never learned the results. Next morning, the FBI director was found dead at his home in Washington, D.C. Anderson subsequently became the first U.S. reporter to expose the CIA’s long-running plots to murder Cuban leader FIDEL CASTRO.