Sullivan, William (with Bill Brown). The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1982. 286 pages.

William C. Sullivan was appointed by J. Edgar Hoover as the number three man in the FBI in 1970, almost thirty years after he first became an agent, and was fired the following year when he began criticizing Hoover's methods. In November 1977, Sullivan was killed in a hunting accident in the woods near his home in New Hampshire. Some consider this to be another suspicious death. But even though Sullivan took secrets to the grave at a time when our national media was interested in reporting them, the evidence of conspiracy in his death is lacking.

This book is valuable mainly as a study of Hoover's autocratic administration. Few enjoyed a close-range view of Hoover, and those that did got there by either flattering him or keeping quiet. Although Sullivan considered himself a liberal Democrat, his politics were contradictory. He supported the expansion of illegal surveillance methods advocated by Nixon's White House (the Huston Plan), while Hoover saw this plan as a turf war and opposed it. At the same time, Hoover was forever pursuing the Communist Party USA. But Sullivan, who was named assistant director of the FBI's Intelligence Division in 1961, had long recognized that the Party was tiny and irrelevant.
ISBN 0-523-41656-3

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