Bad Habits Die Hard

By Richard Lacayo

The old FBI lost its bearings under J. Edgar Hoover, hounding Martin Luther , King Jr. and running wholesale spy operations against groups that opposed the Viet Nam War. A new and improved agency emerged during William Webster's nine years as director. But there was a palpable sense of deja vu in the air last week. First came news that a black agent had been racially harassed by his white colleagues. Then followed charges that the FBI had conducted wide- ranging surveillance of critics of the Reagan Administration's Central American policy.

The racist taunting of Agent Donald Rochon was limited to the bureau's Omaha and Chicago offices, but the domestic surveillance was nationwide, involving 52 of the FBI's 59 field offices. The investigation started in 1981 as a probe of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, an organization sympathetic to leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. It soon grew much broader. Some 1,200 pages of FBI documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a lawyers' group critical of Administration policy. The documents show that the investigation eventually touched more than 160 organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Maryknoll Sisters and the United Auto Workers.

Although organizations opposing U.S. policy in Central America have been the targets of more than 90 unexplained burglaries in recent years, the documents released so far show no evidence of break-ins or illegal wiretaps. They do show that agents used infiltrators, photographed peaceful demonstrators and recorded their license-plate numbers, and kept college students under surveillance.

The FBI claims that it was looking into "alleged criminal activity rather than the motives and beliefs of those being investigated." Critics say that when the bureau failed to find evidence to support a criminal charge, it reclassified its effort as a "counterterrorism" probe, an approach that gives agents broader latitude to investigate U.S. citizens. Gauging the limits of counterterrorism guidelines, which are classified, seemed to leave some field offices in a quandary. In August 1984 the FBI's Denver office sent a plea to headquarters in Washington: "The field is still not sure of how much seemingly legitimate political activity can be monitored."

The disclosure of the surveillance campaign came just days after Rochon got national attention with his story of a sustained campaign of primitive racial harassment. Decisions by both the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had already upheld Rochon's claims of humiliating pranks that began when he was assigned in 1983 to the FBI office in Omaha. A photograph of his children was defaced by pasting an ape's head over the face of his son. Invitations to office functions with the words "Don't come" written across them were placed in his mail slot along with other demeaning messages.

Rochon's Omaha supervisors took no formal action to stop the harassment, which one characterized as "healthy" and a sign of "esprit de corps." When Rochon was transferred to Chicago in 1984, he says, the campaign stepped up in vileness. He began receiving obscene calls and death threats, one of them a photograph of a mutilated black man, with pornographically detailed threats of sexual assault on Rochon's wife, who is white. Some Chicago agents now suggest the incidents were more like hazing that got out of hand. Said one agent of his colleagues: "These guys like to goof around."

The culmination came in 1985 when, Rochon charges, fellow Agent Gary Miller forged Rochon's signature on two insurance policies, one covering accidental death and dismemberment, the other for burial benefits. They arrived at Rochon's home not long after he had begun receiving the threats. Rochon also says that when an internal inquiry found that Miller was behind the forged policies, his punishment was a 14-day suspension without pay.

The Chicago threats were the "turning point for me," says Rochon. In December he and his wife brought a civil suit against the FBI, the Justice Department and several former co-workers. His allegations are also the basis of a criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI in coordination with the Justice Department. Rochon looks back on his experience as if "someone had turned the clock back from the 1980s to the 1950s." Even so, he has no plans to turn in his agent's badge. "It's like a cop who is shot on duty," he explains. "You still go back."

Word of Rochon's experience left President Reagan "very upset," according to his aides. Rochon's story raised questions about how much progress has been made since the days when Hoover doggedly preserved the FBI as a white male bastion. The recruitment of women and minorities was one of former Director Webster's most determined pursuits. There are now about 400 blacks among the FBI's 9,466 special agents, as well as 41 American Indians, 115 Asian Americans and 799 women. But the FBI faces eleven other pending discrimination complaints, as well as a suit by a majority of the 405 Hispanic agents.

At the White House Thursday, recently appointed FBI Director William Sessions met with Attorney General Edwin Meese and Chief of Staff Howard Baker to discuss the week's events. Meanwhile, committees in the House and the Senate were promising to look into both matters. It seemed a bit like old times.

With reporting by Margaret O. Kirk/Philadelphia and Elaine Shannon/Washington