Free Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner Page B

Investigation’s director, Burns promised the public that the Bureau would find the Wall Street bombers.
    Bureau agents in Chicago, looking for clues in the bombing, intercepted a letter from the Communist Party underground in New York. The government was “holding us responsible for the Wall Street disaster,” it said, warning against a new crackdown. “The January raids are past history,” it began. “So some of our members are beginning to think that EVERYTHING IS SAFE. WE WANT TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IS STILL ON THE JOB . It will continue ON THE JOB as long as we exist as a Revolutionary Organization . Spies, stool pigeons, provocateurs, and every form of scum is bound, in some way or other, to get into the organization or learn of its activities.… EXERCISE GREAT CAUTION.… IF YOU ARE ARRESTED … ANSWER NOTHING. ”
    “A N OUTLAW ORGANIZATION ”
    Hoover mobilized his growing network of informers. He combed through reports and tips from Bureau agents, army and navy intelligence officers,leaders of the American Protective League, commanders of the American Legion, police chiefs, corporate executives, bankers, insurance men, telephone and telegraph companies. He warned that the Reds were burrowing into labor unions, factories, churches, schools, colleges, newspapers, magazines, women’s clubs, and Negro organizations. His weekly bulletins to the attorney general hammered home the threat. Daugherty needed no convincing. “Soviet Russia is the enemy of mankind,” he maintained. “They have set out to conquer not only America but the world.”
    In the spring and summer of 1921, dozens of Bureau agents under Hoover’s command spied on suspected Communists across the country, infiltrated their meetings, and broke into their headquarters. When Bureau agents and the New York bomb squad crashed into an apartment on Bleecker Street, seizing Party membership lists, internal reports, and encoded communiqués, they found a pamphlet entitled “Rules for Underground Party Work.”
    The rules were explicit:
  1) DON’T betray Party work and Party workers under any circumstances.
  2) DON’T carry or keep with you names and addresses, except in good code.
  3) DON’T keep in your rooms openly any incriminating documents or literature.
  4) DON’T take any unnecessary risks in Party work.
  5) DON’T shirk Party work because of the risk connected with it.
  6) DON’T boast of what you have to do or have done for the Party.
  7) DON’T divulge your membership in the Party without necessity.
  8) DON’T let any spies follow you to appointments or meetings.
  9) DON’T lose your nerve in danger.
10) DON’T answer any questions if arrested.
    The pamphlet concluded: “AVOID ARREST BY ALL POSSIBLE MEANS.” That was a tall order for America’s top Communists. Almost all the men who led the Communist Party over the next four decades did jail time for their political work between 1918 and 1923. Few went more than a few months without facing a policeman, a judge, or a jail cell—locked up or under indictment on charges of conspiracy or sedition.
    “Spies are on the job every day in every city bent upon ferreting out ourmembers, our meetings and working places,” the Bleecker Street pamphlet warned. The Communists believed they were under surveillance by the government every minute of their lives, whether they worked openly or underground.
    One of the Bureau’s spies attended the “Unity Convention of Communist Parties” held at the Overlook Mountain Hotel in Woodstock, New York, in May 1921—asecret four-day meeting of Communist leaders from across America. FBI documents declassified in August 2011 suggest the infiltrator wasClarence Hathaway, a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States and, according to the documents, an informant for the Bureau from the start.
    The Bureau’s report on the Woodstock gathering noted that Moscow had