Cartha D. DeLoach, No. 3 in the F.B.I., Is Dead at 92

[Douglas Caddy]

From the article:

Mr. DeLoach had met and worked with Johnson in the 1950s, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader; he and Johnson helped push through legislation guaranteeing Hoover a salary for life. In 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson called Hoover — Mr. DeLoach said it was the day after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One — and requested that Mr. DeLoach be assigned to the White House.

“There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other,” Mr. DeLoach said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Johnson library at the University of Texas. “Mr. Hoover was anxious to retain his job and to stay on as director. He knew that the best way for the F.B.I. to operate fully and to get some cooperation of the White House was for him to be cooperative with President Johnson.”

“President Johnson, on the other hand,” Mr. DeLoach continued, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road conservative elements, and knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the F.B.I. — insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned. As a result it was a marriage, not altogether of necessity, but it was a definite friendship caused by necessity.”

Cartha D. DeLoach, No. 3 in the F.B.I., Is Dead at 92

By BRUCE WEBER

The New York Times

March 15, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/cartha-d-deloach-no-3-in-fbi-is-dead-at-92.html?ref=obituaries

Cartha D. DeLoach, who as a top aide and confidant to J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I.’s liaison to the White House and a powerful intermediary between Hoover and President Lyndon B. Johnson during an especially tense political era, died on Wednesday on Hilton Head Island, S.C. He was 92.

The death was confirmed by his son Tom.

Mr. DeLoach, who was known as Deke, spent more than 25 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rising to deputy associate director, the No. 3 position, behind only Mr. Hoover and the associate director, Clyde Tolson.

Mr. DeLoach had met and worked with Johnson in the 1950s, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader; he and Johnson helped push through legislation guaranteeing Hoover a salary for life. In 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson called Hoover — Mr. DeLoach said it was the day after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One — and requested that Mr. DeLoach be assigned to the White House.

“There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other,” Mr. DeLoach said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Johnson library at the University of Texas. “Mr. Hoover was anxious to retain his job and to stay on as director. He knew that the best way for the F.B.I. to operate fully and to get some cooperation of the White House was for him to be cooperative with President Johnson.”

“President Johnson, on the other hand,” Mr. DeLoach continued, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road conservative elements, and knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the F.B.I. — insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned. As a result it was a marriage, not altogether of necessity, but it was a definite friendship caused by necessity.”

At the time, Mr. DeLoach headed the bureau’s crime records division, which was also in charge of public affairs. He was a principal spokesman for the bureau in the investigation of the murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers who were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the early summer of 1964. Their bodies were not discovered until August; it was Mr. DeLoach who called the president to deliver the news.

Johnson called on the bureau to perform tasks that caused friction with other agencies. Fearful of assassination, he added F.B.I. agents to his security detail, infringing on the territory of the Secret Service. And he drew the bureau into the political arena, requesting investigations into political opponents and reporters.

Mr. DeLoach was the main conduit between Johnson and Hoover, and though he acknowledged that he knew the president occasionally asked the F.B.I. to overstep its authority, he said that other presidents had done the same, and that when the president of the United States asks for something, it is difficult to say no.

“DeLoach was always at L.B.J.’s beck and call, night and day,” said Tim Weiner, a former New York Times reporter and the author of “Enemies: A History of the F.B.I.,” published last year. “He was a talented political hatchet man, a trusted deputy to Hoover. He was also crucial to intelligence investigations conducted during the Johnson presidency.”

Mr. DeLoach became head of F.B.I. investigations in 1965, leading the bureau’s assault on the Klan after the 1964 killings in Mississippi. He supervised the investigation of the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But he had also been part of the bureau’s scrutiny of the civil rights movement and was aware of the bureau’s secret surveillance of Dr. King in his private life. In Mr. Weiner’s book, Nicholas Katzenbach, an attorney general under Johnson, said he believed that Mr. DeLoach had offered reporters the chance to listen to tapes of Dr. King having sex with a woman who was not his wife.

Mr. DeLoach denied that accusation.

Cartha Dekle DeLoach was born on July 20, 1920, in Claxton, Ga., about 50 miles west of Savannah. His father, Cartha Calhoun DeLoach, was a “merchant of some kind,” Tom DeLoach said. The father died when Cartha, his only child, was 10 and “left the family in a whole lot of debt,” Tom DeLoach said. Young Cartha worked in cotton fields to help pay the bills, and his mother, the former Eula Dekle, took in boarders. He played football at Claxton High School and on a football scholarship went to Stetson University in Florida, where he played quarterback.

Mr. DeLoach joined the F.B.I. in August 1942 as a clerk and became a special agent that December. He worked in field offices in Norfolk, Va., and Cleveland before going on military leave. He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946. During his tenure at the bureau under Hoover, its priorities shifted from ferreting out spies during and after World War II, to combating communist ideologues during the early years of the cold war, to pursuing perceived threats to the country in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

“Deke’s commitment to the F.B.I. and to the American people at large was a hallmark of his life,” Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, said in a statement.

In addition to his son Tom, Mr. DeLoach is survived by his wife of 68 years, the former Barbara Owens; three other sons, Cartha Jr., who is also known as Deke, Gregory and Mark; three daughters, Barbara Lancaster, Theresa DeLoach and Sharon Bleifeld; and “countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Tom DeLoach said.

After retiring in 1970, Mr. DeLoach worked as a corporate affairs executive for Pepsico until 1985 and later in banking in South Carolina. When Hoover died in 1972, Mr. DeLoach was considered a possible replacement. In 1995, he published a memoir, “Hoover’s F. B. I.: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant,” in which he defended the F.B.I. against its many critics.

In a 2007 oral history interview with the Society of Former Special Agents of the F.B.I., he said: “In my humble opinion, despite the good job the F.B.I. has done, it has not received anywhere near sufficient credit for doing all the tremendous investigative work, all the sacrifice, the labor, the blood, the sweat, the tears, to put it proverbially, that we have done. We have not been given credit.”

[Douglas Caddy]

When I first joined the forum years ago, I wrote about residing in the Manhattan residence of newspaper columnist Alice Widener while being employed by New York Lt.-Gov. Malcolm Wilson in the NYC office of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the early 1960s. I worked in daytime and attended New York University Law School at night.

I knew Alice because I had written an article in 1958 about George Kennan for her bi-weekly newsletter, USA, while still a sophomore at Georgetown University . She also knew of my role in founding Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 with the assistance of William F. Buckley and Gov. Charles Edison. Both Alice and I considered ourselves to be Conservatives, although not of the extremist kind common today in public affairs.

Alice Widener's first husband was Nicholas Sergei Berezowsky, who fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took over. He did so playing the piano in whore houses as he worked his way clandestinely to the border. He was an accomplished musician and during the Great Depression was the conductor of the NBC radio orchestra. Alice would tell me about their living comfortably on Park Avenue during the hard times while their formerly affluent friends would come each night for dinner.

When Berezowsky died, Alice remarried a Widener. Apparently after some years this led to a divorce. Afterwards Alice kept the name Widener as her last name.

However, as Alice Berezowsky, widow of Nicholas Sergei Berezowksy, at the urging of the FBI she became a regular financial contributor to the U.S. Communist Party and attended some of its more important meetings.

Her most regular FBI contact for years was with Cartha "Deke" DeLoach. She would pass information along to him about the Party's activities and he would sometimes call her and ask that she mention something in one of her newspaper columns that the FBI wanted leaked publicly.

About one month or so she would receive a telephone call from J. Edgar Hoover who valued her opinion on the communist movement.

She was a frequent contributor to Barron's Financial Weekly and its editor, Robert Bleiberg, would come to dinner at Alice's residence on East 72nd St. once a week or so. Her coop was on the 21st floor on East 72nd St. at the East River, and had a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline, the East River and Roosevelt Island. Lt.-Gov. Wilson once visited and told her that if he lived there he would have a hard time ever leaving the building to go to the office as the views from it was something one would see in a movie. In fact, the penthouse right above her floor was owned by Frank Sinatra.

She never received or desired any compensation for her undercover FBI work. Her role was never disclosed publicly until I wrote about it here years ago. She was a true patriot. She thought the world of Cartha "Deke" Deloach and Hoover and of the Bureau generally.

Edited March 18, 2013 by Douglas Caddy

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I spoke with Cartha "Deke" DeLoach a few times in the past year or so. I called him up in South Carolina where he lives. He told me Lyndon Johnson personally told him to vet candidates for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He told me he had two lunches with Richard Helms and recommended him to LBJ over another candidate from the FBI.

That shows us hierarchy of the FBI over the CIA in the world of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ even asked the FBI to provide him personal protection rather than the Secret Service.

Lyndon Johnson's right hand man at the FBI was not Hoover, who was LBJ's neighbor for 19 years (1943-1961) and close friend.; rather it was Deke DeLoach. Deke DeLoach was inner circle Lyndon Johnson; as inner circle as you could possibly be. Remember he was picking a DCI for LBJ.

LBJ would call up Hoover and the work out the nitty gritty details with Deke DeLoach for any task or operation (or crime) that he had in mind.

DeLoach also told me that the FBI hierarchy had a copy of the Zapruder Film and were watching it at midnight on 11/23/63. I asked if the FBI ever determined Oswald to be US intelligence and DeLoach just laughed that off.

I asked DeLoach to describe LBJ and the first words out of his mouth were: "He was a family man." ... Later he said "He cared about those kids in Cotulla. He would let them have 1/2 his lunch." Then it was "I came in one time and he (LBJ) was crying over Vietnam.

DeLoach told me about the time LBJ bought Christmas presents for everyone in his family; the time he and his family spent at Camp David with the Johnsons over Easter; the time LBJ sent flowers to the hospital for DeLoaches wife when she was sick and the flowers had the White House insignia on them. DeLoach was so close to LBJ and his staff, he was almost like family.

He told me that he met Mary Margaret Valenti (nee Wiley) only one time; that was after I pointed out that Mary Margaret was LBJ's most key mistress (and former secretary).

Deke DeLoach was a staunch defender of both Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. I would compare him to the last Jap still in a bunker and still fighting on a Pacific island in WWII.

DeLoach was the de facto PR man for the FBI; he played a very key role in the cover up of the JFK assassination by manipulating FBI media assets. DeLoach was extremely close to LBJ; very close to Walter Jenkins' LBJ's chief of staff and later close to Marvin Watson who succeeded Walter Jenkins as LBJ's chief of staff.

I consider DeLoach to be a loyal team player for the wrong team; and that means he was a xxxx and a very disingenous man. LBJ used him for a lot of dirty FBI chores on his behalf. The FBI was LBJ's Gestapo. DeLoach also spent has later years trying to tell everyone Hoover and Clyde Tolson were not gay, which is bull.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Robert Morrow

[John Simkin]

FBI agent Arthur Murtagh appeared before the US House Select Committee on Intelligence on 18th November, 1975. He claimed that at a meeting of senior FBI agents DeLoach told them: "The other night, we picked up a siuation where this senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad was with him. We got the information, reported it in a memorandum, and by noon the next day, the senator was aware that we had the information, and we never had trouble with him on appropriations since."

Deke DeLoach became friends with Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1950s. It was DeLoach who arranged with Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, to push through legislation guaranteeing J. Edgar Hoover, a salary for life. DeLoach later recalled: “There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other." However, he denied that the two men worked together to blackmail politicians. In his book, Hoover's FBI (1995), DeLoach argued: "The popular myth, fostered of late by would-be historians and sensationalists with their eyes on the bestseller list, has it that in his day J. Edgar Hoover all but ran Washington, using dirty tricks to intimidate congressmen and presidents, and phone taps, bugs, and informants to build secret files with which to blackmail lawmakers." According to DeLoach this was not true.

Ronald Kessler, the author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (2002) has suggested that DeLoach was involved in blackmailing Senator Carl T. Hayden, chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, into following the instructions of Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover. In April 1962, Roy L. Elson, Hayden's administrative assistant, questioned Hayden's decision to approve the $60 million cost of the FBI building. When he discovered what Elson was saying, DeLoach "hinted" that he had "information that was unflattering and detrimental to my marital situation... I was certainly vulnerable that way... There was more than one girl... The implication was there was information about my sex life... I interpreted it as attempted blackmail."

The day following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, called J. Edgar Hoover and requested that DeLoach be assigned to the White House. DeLoach was involved in the investigation of the assassination of Kennedy. In one memo sent to Clyde Tolson, DeLoach claimed that Johnson "felt the CIA had something to do with the plot" to kill Kennedy. According to David Talbot, DeLoach "dismissed the president's dark mutterings as simply his efforts to reassure himself that the Warren Report was correct." Richard Helms added: "I didn't know whether (Johnson's conspiracy talk) was just like the fly fisherman flick over the water to see if he has any takers, or whether he really believed it."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKdeloach.htm

[Douglas Caddy]

Elsewhere in JFK topic in the forum I have cited some material given me by retired NYPD detective Jim Rothstein with whom I am now engaged in a project to expose human trafficking.

It is Rothstein’s belief, which I have come to embrace, is that it is impossible to understand most of what is happening in government and in both the public and private sectors without applying the test of whether the key person involved has been compromised. By compromised is meant whether the person has engaged in illicit sex or other criminal acts that are known to others who use this information to blackmail and extort.

J. Edgar Hoover and Cartha “Deke” DeLoach were masters of blackmailing and getting what they desired through extortion. In the case of these two FBI officials it was a form of extortion to get monies appropriated by Congress for projects they wanted funded. They used information gathered by FBI agents from both public and private sources as blackmail to compromise a person. In turn, Hoover himself was a compromised person because of his fondness for young boys and the Mafia held this over him.

Other government agencies regularly have used blackmail and extortion and some have set up traps to ensnare those they want to compromise. Among those compromised are two men who have held the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense. When Rothstein and Rosenthal, his NYPD cop partner, confronted a U.S. Senator in a gay bar in New York City with information that he had been compromised through pedophilia, he immediately reached for the establishment’s phone and called a famous lawyer. When the lawyer learned the cops were Rothstein and Rosenthal, he told the Senator that there was nothing he could do.

What Rothstein and his partner learned soon after they began investigating human trafficking was that the information they gathered of names of customers in big operations could not be placed in the general files of the NYPD because anyone having access to the files could use them for extortion. As a result separate, special files had to be set up to safeguard the acquired information.

How many of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been compromised by their illicit sex activities and are subject to blackmail and extortion today? How many of 100 Senators? How many who hold cabinet posts or high governmental offices? Catherine Austin Fitts, who was undersecretary of HUD in the George H.W. Bush Administration, has told in radio interviews that I have heard how HUD Secretary Jack Kemp would say to her, “Catherine, what do they have on you?” to which she would truthfully respond, “Nothing, absolutely nothing” and to which he would reply, “That’s impossible. They have something on everyone.” How Kemp was compromised is widely known.

Here are some infamous if somewhat dated examples of how compromise situations are set up:

• 'CALL-BOY' SERVICE PROSPERS USING HIGH FINANCE, HIGH TECH," Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald , The Washington Times, June 20, 1989
  

In which we see Henry Vinson's name first surface, along with Robert Chambers, a funeral director, who operated a call boy network that laundered money through umbrella organizations in the District of Columbia area, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia.

• "POWER BROKER SERVED DRUGS, SEX AT PARTIES BUGGED FOR BLACKMAIL," Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, June 30, 1989
  

In which we learn of Craig J. Spence, who arranged midnight tours of the White House, threw lavish parties for the famous and powerful where cocaine was generously served, spent $20,000 a month on male prostitutes from a D.C. prostitution ring, and bragged of connections to the CIA, whom he worried might kill him and then make it look like a suicide.

• "RNC CALLS SCANDAL A 'TRAGIC SITUATION,'" George Archibald and Paul M. Rodriguez, The Washington Times, Friday, June 30, 1989
  

In which we learn of the resignation of an aide to Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, and of the reaction of Rep. Barney Frank, who is "not surprised" by the revelations.

• "White House mute on 'call boy' probe," Frank J. Murray, The Washington Times, July 7, 1989
  

In which we learn that President Bush followed the story, and that a Uniformed Division officer of the Special Service, Reginald deGueldre, arranged the midnight White House tours for Craig Spence and two male prostitutes, and was moonlighting as Spence's bodyguard.

• "Spence was target before raid on ring," Jerry Seper, and Michael Hedges The Washington Times, July 10, 1989
  

In which we learn that Craig Spence brought a 15-year old boy on at least one of his midnight tours of the White House, that Spence asked detailed questions about the Delta Force operations, that he partied with a former U.S. Attorney and his wife, and that he bragged of having blackmailed a high-ranking Japanese politician, Motoo Shiina.

• "Spence ma[y] be Shiina's downfall," Edward Neilan, The Washington Times, July 18, 1989
  

In which we hear of the connections between Motoo Shiina, groomed to be a future prime minister of Japan, and Craig Spence: how Spence had made more than $700,000 from Shiina's Policy Study Group, and how Spence had refused to pay back a loan made by Shiina for the purchase of Spence's house.

• "First lady not worried about hookers' tour of White House," Paul Bedard, The Washington Times, July 10, 1989
  

In which we learn that First Lady Barbara Bush was not concerned about the security questions raised by midnight White House tours, but did think it good that the Washington Post had not followed the Times' story.

• "IN DEATH, SPENCE STAYED TRUE TO FORM," Michael Hedges, and Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, Monday, November 13, 1989.
  

Craig Spence is found dead in a Boston hotel room. Near his body is a newspaper clipping that details legislative efforts to protect CIA agents called to testify before government bodies. Friends of Spence reported that he had claimed the CIA used the call boy service to compromise other federal intelligence officials and foreign diplomats. One friend quoted Spence as saying, "Casey's boys are out to get me,"

[Douglas Caddy]

One highly disturbing case of human trafficking and being compromised that Rothstein and Rosenthal investigated involved an agency in the Intelligence Community that operated a child prostitution ring in New York City that lured targeted customers who wanted to engage in pedophilia. In 1971 the two NYPD cops received word that the Intelligence Agent in charge of the ring had killed three young boys after they had been forced to engage in acts of pedophilia with the targeted customers. The two cops even had a possible lead as to where the bodies of the three children had been buried. They arranged for a subpoena to be served on the Intelligence Agent in Locust Valley, New York. However, the subpoena was quashed on the basis that the national security was involved. The question has to be asked as to what part of the national security laws allows the killing of children.

[John Dolva]

Kudos to you, Douglas.