William C. Sullivan

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William Cornelius Sullivan (1912 - 9 November 1977) was former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence operations.

Born in Hudson, Massachusetts, Sullivan held advanced degrees from American University and George Washington University. He also held an honorary doctorate from Boston College.

Sullivan joined the FBI early in World War II, when he was dispatched by J. Edgar Hoover on an undercover intelligence mission to Spain. Mr. Sullivan returned to bureau headquarters in Washington and took the first in a series of administrative posts that ultimately included a decade as head of the domestic intelligence division starting in 1961, and a brief tenure as the bureau's third-ranking official behind Mr. Hoover, the director, and his longtime companion, Clyde Tolson. According to his New York Times obituary, Sullivan was "the only liberal Democrat ever to break into the top ranks of the bureau."

Sullivan claimed Hoover's concerns about the American Communist Party were overemphasized when compared to violations of Federal civil rights laws in the segregrated south. This friction worsened as Sullivan made his opinions public. In 1971 Sullivan's FBI career ended abruptly after Hoover ordered the lock on his door changed and his nameplate removed.

Sullivan then became even more vocal about Hoover's controversial counterintelligence programs, collectively labeled COINTELPRO, including some that he himself had conceived and administered. These were intended to spread confusion and dissension among extremist political groups in this country, ranging from the Communist Party on the left to the Ku Klux Klan on the right. In 1975, he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Never once did I hear anybody, including myself raise the question, is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?"

Sullivan was instrumental in the arranging for the mailing of a tape recording in 1964 to Coretta Scott King, that contained secretly taped recordings of her husband Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking with other women. In a memo, Sullivan called King "a fraud, demagogue and scoundrel". He also gave orders to track down fugitive members of the Weather Underground in the early 1970's.

After Hoover's death, Sullivan was brought back to office by President Richard Nixon. Sullivan hoped to replace Hoover as the bureau's director but was passed over by Richard Nixon in favor of loyalist L. Patrick Gray.

Sullivan was accidentally shot and killed while deer hunting near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire by a 22-year-old hunter named Robert Daniels, Jr.

[edit] Publications

Sullivan, William C. (1979). My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01236-0.
World communism: Strategy and tactics
The need to teach about communism in our schools.
The university, communism and the community: An address at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, October 18, 1961
"Freedom is the exception": Three lectures on the values of the open society