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Hoover's personal secretary (for 54 years) Helen Gandy, 78, testified before the subcommittee that her boss had told her that upon his death all such personal papers should be destroyed. She said she and another secretary then went through every piece of paper at Hoover's house and found nothing involving official bureau business; there were mostly personal letters. She said she had them all burned or shredded.
TIME has learned that FBI sources are certain that Hoover kept many highly sensitive files about newsmen, former White House aides and possibly even about Nixon. The records also included information on the drinking habits and personal lives of several Supreme Court Justices. But technically they were not called "secret files," so Mohr's denial of their existence is not perjurious. They were kept not in Hoover's private office but elsewhere in his suite, these sources believe.
Before Secretary Gandy could look at them in Hoover's house, the most sensitive papers were carried off in an FBI truck to West Virginia's Blue Ridge Club, a Shenandoah Mountain hideaway used by innermost FBI officials for regular poker games with CIA and other cronies (TIME, Nov. 3). There the papers were burned in the club's large fireplace. Precisely who ordered this destruction and carried it out has not been disclosed. The three-story club, valued at up to $200,000, burned to the ground in a fire of undetermined cause on Nov. 23. No evidence of arson has been discovered.
Waves of Shock. TIME has also learned that FBI Director Clarence Kelley has ordered an investigation of his agency's business relations with one of the frequent poker players at the club: Joseph Tait, president of Washington's U.S. Recording Co., which buys bugging and wiretapping equipment and sells it to the FBI. In the spy business (he also sells to the CIA), Tait is known as a "cutout," whose role is to prevent victims of electronic snooping from knowing what type of equipment the agencies are using against them. Kelley is pursuing reports that Tait may have been charging the FBI as much as 30% more than he paid the manufacturers for this equipment.
Such a rare internal investigation is sending waves of shock and rumor through the FBI. Morale was further jolted by the testimony last week of a former FBI informer. Appearing before the Senate committee wearing a cloth mask to preserve a new identity adopted for self-protection, an informer once known as Gary Rowe Jr. testified that he had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for the FBI in the early 1960s. He said he was told to do everything possible to sow dissension within the Klan. Rowe said of Klan families: "I was told to sleep with as many wives as I could, to break up marriages." (He slept with some.) He claimed that he warned the FBI that the Klan planned to attack Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 and that the FBI did nothing to stop the beatings.