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Adams became the bureau's personnel director in 1965, and was made an inspector in 1971. The next year he signed his name as a witness to a document that was supposedly signed in FBI headquarters by Hoover's top aide, Clyde Tolson. It was later revealed in a lawsuit that the Tolson signing never took place—his name had been written on the legal papers by his secretary—and Adams' reputation became more clouded.
When Hoover died in 1972, Gray took over and immediately scotched a plan to promote Adams again. Instead, trying to rid the bureau of hard-core Hooverites, Gray ordered Adams out of headquarters, to the backwater office in San Antonio. (Many veteran agents believe that Adams urged Attorney General Bell to prosecute Gray for the Weatherman break-ins to even the score.)
Clarence Kelley was appointed FBI director in 1973 and seemed to be having a hard time gaining control of the Bureau machinery. Retired Administrator Mohr, according to many agents, urged Kelley to bring Adams back from exile. Kelley did so, and Adams prospered: within a year, he was named the bureau's third in command, in charge of all FBI investigations. The promotion of Adams created one of Kelley's biggest headaches, forcing him to deny repeatedly that the bureau was being controlled by Hoover's people. The charge was that Mohr still flashed signals to Adams and to Nicholas Callahan, once Mohr's lieutenant and at that time Kelley's top aide.
Kelley's headache became acute when House hearings on FBI practices compelled him to open a probe into the corruption of an agency once thought incorruptible. It turned out that FBI administrators had sanctioned big markups in the price of bugging equipment bought by the bureau from a favored contractor, Joseph Tait. Mohr, Callahan, Adams and as many as a dozen other FBI officials regularly played poker with Tait at the Blue Ridge Club near Harpers Ferry, W. Va.
The FBI's investigation of itself was supervised by Callahan, Adams and another of Mohr's gambling buddies. After a two-month inquiry, the probers concluded that Mohr had done nothing wrong, the bureau's purchasing procedures were proper, and the games were just innocent social gatherings. Former Attorney General Edward H. Levi dismissed the findings as a whitewash and ordered the FBI to investigate again, under close Justice Department supervision. The second time around, the findings forced Kelley to discharge Callahan for misuse of FBI funds. Mohr, in retirement, was criticized, but Adams emerged unscathed.
Adams' supervision of FBI investigations has gained him even greater mistrust among veteran agents. They cite three reasons:
1) Adams has been unable to plug damaging leaks of FBI materials to the Mafia. In Cleveland, such leaks resulted last fall in the murders of two FBI informants and endangered a number of other sources.