James Rosen’s letter (Nov. 2) gives too much credit to John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, for preventing the Nixon administration from implementing the Huston Plan. In the summer of 1970, Nixon ordered Tom Charles Huston, a young right-wing attorney and White House aide, to develop a plan to improve U.S. intelligence gathering. The plan called for unlimited wiretaps and bugs, increased surveillance on U.S. citizens, illegal mail opening, surreptitious entries (break-ins), burglaries (black-bag jobs), misinformation press releases and methods of entrapment. In short, it was the most oppressive U.S....

President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the White House.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

James Rosen’s letter (Nov. 2) gives too much credit to John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, for preventing the Nixon administration from implementing the Huston Plan. In the summer of 1970, Nixon ordered Tom Charles Huston, a young right-wing attorney and White House aide, to develop a plan to improve U.S. intelligence gathering. The plan called for unlimited wiretaps and bugs, increased surveillance on U.S. citizens, illegal mail opening, surreptitious entries (break-ins), burglaries (black-bag jobs), misinformation press releases and methods of entrapment. In short, it was the most oppressive U.S. domestic spying program ever conceived.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hated the plan and killed it—carefully. He let the White House know, through Mitchell, that he would go along with the Huston Plan only if he had written authorization by the attorney general and the president. Hoover knew Nixon would never affix his signature to a document allowing virtually unlimited use of patently illegal activities against political dissidents. Mitchell went to Nixon with Hoover’s demand and together the two decided it would be political suicide to sign such an order. The Huston Plan died.

Hoover’s subtle murder of the Huston Plan didn’t completely end warrantless wiretaps, black-bag jobs and surveillance of citizens by intelligence agencies, but the FBI director’s intransigence at least kept those agencies from spinning out of control. It’s hard for his critics to accept that the hated J. Edgar Hoover, whatever his motivations, managed to ward off the most massive abuse of U.S. civil liberties in the modern era, but he did.

Paul Letersky

Nehalem, Ore.

Mr. Letersky, a former FBI special agent, is author of “The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover.”