© Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc. 2009
Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI
John T. Conway (1950 - 1956)
Stanley A. Pimentel, Interviewer
Interviewed on June 9, 2009
Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on August 2, 2009. Mr. Conway’s corrections
made by Sandra Robinette on September 16, 2009.
Pimentel/
(P): Today is June 9, 2009. It‟s ten twenty-five in the morning and I‟m with John T. Conway,
who has graciously accepted, acceded to speak for the Oral History Project about his time
in the FBI.
Mr. Conway, I‟ve got a form here, it‟s a Copyright Release….
Conway/
(C): Okay.
P:
… and background form which I‟ll let you read or I‟ll read it.
We, the undersigned convey the rights to the intellectual content by interview on this date
to the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. This transfer is in exchange for the
Society‟s efforts to preserve the historical legacy of the FBI and its members. We
understand that portions of this interview may be deleted for security purposes. Unless
otherwise restricted we agree that acceptable sections can be published on the worldwide
web and the recordings transferred to an established repository for preservation and
research. If you don‟t mind signing?
C:
Okay.
P:
Eventually all of these recordings and transcriptions will go to the National Law
Enforcement Officers Memorial Museum once it‟s built. They‟ve signed an agreement
with the Society to hold our recordings. Anyway if we could start, Mr. Conway, and if
you could tell me where you were born and raised?
C:
I was born in New York City, specifically in the Bronx, south Bronx on May 10, 1924.
P:
Happy Birthday!
C:
Well thank you.
P:
Nineteen?
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
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C:
1924. That happened to be also the exact date that J. Edgar Hoover was appointed
Director of the predecessor to the FBI. He was appointed by the Attorney General, Harlan
Fisk Stone but that was the same date that I was born.
I was raised in the Bronx, went to DeWitt Clinton High School, an all boys public school
and before that I went to P.S. 7. In any event my education was in the public schools in
New York City. My father was a policeman in the New York City Police Department,
where he remained for more than thirty years. When I eventually went into the Bureau
he was still on the New York City Police Department.
In any event when I graduated from high school I didn‟t have much money to go to
college so I went to work at a bank down in Wall Street for the sum of $18.00 a week
plus my lunch. I went there and then I decided to go to night school. I went to George
Washington High School at night to get some courses that I had not been able to get in
mathematics before I graduated from Clinton. Then I worked from midnight until eight
in the morning in the mail room at the bank.
In 1942 during World War II, the Navy was recruiting volunteers for pilot training
including young men eighteen years of age and older. However, if you were eighteen,
the navy required a parent‟s written permission. I wanted to volunteer, but my father
would not give me his permission at first. Finally, in October or November of 1942, he
relented and signed the necessary papers. I took the physical and mental exams and
passed. I had one road block, however, in that my birth certificate, which the Navy
required, was not certified and my swearing-in was delayed until I could get a certified
copy from the New York City Board of Health. In any event just prior to Christmas in
1942, I was notified by the Navy that pilot training was being held up pending some
changes in the program. I and several other fellows were told that if we were willing to
be sworn in as enlisted personnel we would be given papers reflecting that we were
eligible for flight school once recruiting reopened. I decided to wait a while but then at
the end of January 1943, I did elect to go in as an enlisted man and was sent to Great
Lakes Book Camp on February 4, 1043.
While I was at boot camp, my father sent me a newspaper clipping indicating that the
Navy was taking in pilots for training. So I went to see the officer in charge of my group
and he looked into it and then I was told I‟d have to get nine months of credit as an
enlisted man before I could transfer. So I tried to go up the officer‟s ranks and even went
to talk to the chaplain. And the chaplain told me everything would work out all right and
there was nothing he could do. So anyway I‟d been hooked.
P:
They had gotten you.
C:
Yeah they had gotten me.
P:
There‟s no doubt about it.
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C:
At any rate I was fortunate to have a good chief in charge of our group and he came to me
one day and told me that they were interviewing sailors for something new coming up
called the V-Twelve Program, which was training to become an officer. So he sent me
over to the main area at Great Lakes and I was interviewed by an officer and he asked me
some questions. One was a tough question in mathematics; if I knew the equation to solve
a quadratic and fortunately I taken all the math courses at both George Washington and
Clinton and I was able to rattle it off.
After that I went home on leave; didn‟t know what had happened, came back after my
group leave and was going to be sent to an aviation training course to become an aviation
mechanic.
I didn‟t know until one day while I was waiting for my orders to be shipped out of Great
Lakes I was told that I was supposed to be over in another camp for the V-Twelve
Program. I got over to Camp Moffat and found out I was the last one reporting in and
there were a hundred and twenty sailors, a hundred to be selected but twenty alternates,
and since I was the last one reporting in I figured I was one of the alternates. It turned
out, however, I was one of the hundred. We spent I guess two months there before we
shipped out.
The local Chief Petty Officers and other rated personnel, knowing we were all guys going
to be sent to college for training to be officers gave us all the dirtiest jobs they could.
P:
Of course.
C:
So we were working all kinds of dirty jobs for about two months. And then a hundred of
us were sent out to different schools. I was one of the last, I was one of, I think about
twenty of the last to be selected. [Of] the last twenty, ten went to Notre Dame and ten
went to Dartmouth and I was in the ten sent to Dartmouth.
I reported in at Dartmouth, spent some time there, two semesters, and then we were given
a chance, if we wanted to switch into the ROTC, to be able to get appointed to the regular
Navy as permanent officers. So I elected for that and then was sent to Tufts College, just
outside of Boston where I finished up an engineering course. I was commissioned. After
commissioning, I was supposed to go to P.T. boats. They no longer needed anyone at
P.T. boats so I was assigned to a P.C. which is an old type of sub chaser.
P:
You were commissioned, when?
C:
I was commissioned in 1945.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
And, yeah it must have been „45. I then went on P.C. 781 and spent some time on P.C.
781 in the Atlantic Ocean.
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John T. Conway
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P:
P.C. is what?
C:
Patrol Craft. P.C. is the smallest ocean going Naval vessel that there is. It‟s much
smaller than a D.E., Destroyer Escort. But in any event, I spent time on that and
eventually after the war was all over I ended up, I came out of the Navy as Lieutenant
J.G., and then went to law school.
P:
Never got a chance to fly?
C:
Never got a chance to fly. And after that I was happy to be out. In fact the poor guys that
flew, the early guys that flew took an awful beating out in the Pacific. And I always think
of President Bush who went in at eighteen…
P:
Yeah.
C:
And his father would have to have signed the papers for him to get in at eighteen. He
was one of the youngest guys in there and I always had a great deal of respect for him.
P:
Yes, and then being shot down.
C:
And being shot down. Yes. I have great regard for him. In fact years later he gave me my
first Presidential appointment. I always thought I owed him one.
P:
Congratulations. We‟ll get back into that.
C:
Okay.
P:
After you got out? You went to college or law school?
C:
Actually when I first got out of the Navy, I went back to Tufts to get my Mechanical
Engineering Degree, a degree in Engineering. When we first were commissioned we
were given a Bachelor of Naval Science Degree and I went back for one semester to get
my Engineering Degree and then took some courses at Columbia to qualify to get into the
law school.
So I got into Columbia Law School in 1947. I was one of a group of veterans, who the
school was willing to let go through the three year course in two years. So we did the
three years in two. I was living about an hour away. I didn‟t have enough money to live
on the campus. I was married while I was at law school and it took me one hour one way
and one hour home to get to school.
P:
Whew. Where did you live?
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C:
I lived way out in Brooklyn. It was hard getting an apartment and I was out on Avenue M
in Brooklyn and I‟d take the BMT into Times Square and then change to the IRT and go
up to 116th Street where Columbia was located.
I held a part-time job while I was doing this. Eventually I graduated, in two years; was
elected president of my class and then started looking for a job. Things were a little
tough then. I finally got a job.
P:
You graduated when? 19??
C:
1949. I graduated in „49 and went looking for a job in the law firms and things were
really tight then. I finally did get a job in Wall Street with a law firm. I look at some of
the salaries that are listed today for young lawyers just getting started, particularly in the
Wall Street area. I started at twenty-six dollars a week.
P:
Oh gee. Now it‟s a couple of million.
C:
Really. They get a hundred and some odd thousand or something, not a week but a year.
But anyway twenty-six dollars a week; and had a wife and child to support. I put out
applications to a lot of places and apparently I had forgotten, but one of them was the
Bureau. Oh, I know what - I had run into a friend of mine, a fellow I had been in the
Navy with who after he got out joined the FBI and he was in the New York Office and he
encouraged me to put in an application to the Bureau. And of course the Bureau in those
days was paying five thousand dollars a year. This fellow was not a lawyer but had
gotten in right after the war when they were still taking people who were not lawyers or
accountants.
It was just before Christmas in „49. In fact I remember going to Macy‟s to buy a tricycle
for my son for Christmas and it took my whole paycheck, my whole week‟s salary. I
carried it home on the subway and when I got home, in fact, I found there was a letter
waiting for me. It was dated December 21, 1949, signed J.E. Hoover, at least his name
was on it, offering me an appointment as Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. You‟d be on probation for two years. It‟s two year probation if you were
accepted. And in the letter, and I‟m reading from it now, “It will be necessary for you to
undergo a rigid physical examination immediately upon your reporting to Washington for
duty” and this was underlined, not by me but it‟s underlined in the letter. “In the event
the physical examination reflects that you are not capable of performing strenuous duties
or that your color vision or vision is not normal or that you have any defect which might
interfere with your use of firearms this appointment will be cancelled.” (Laughing).
P:
(Laughing).
C:
Anyway I did report down; and the date I was to report was January 9. So I reported
January 9, 1950.
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John T. Conway
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P:
That didn‟t give you much time to think about it.
C:
That‟s right. But you had to notify them immediately. I had to notify them immediately if
I would be willing to accept this and report into Washington. Of course reporting into
Washington which I did and I reported into the old, the old Ident Building….
P:
At Fourth and?
C:
It was, I think it was D Street.
P:
Right.
C:
Yes. And when I got there, there were I think twelve. It was a small group. We were
twelve, it could have been twelve or fourteen. I forgot now but we were all veterans of
the military service except two. There were two re-tread fellows who had been in the
Bureau, had left and then wanted to come back. But all of us except for the two re-treads,
were lawyers, and not only lawyers but had passed a Bar, because that was a requirement
you had to be a lawyer, and had to have passed a Bar, one of the Bars.
P:
So you had passed?
C:
I had passed the Bar in New York, yes. I had taken the Bar and passed the Bar in New
York.
Among the group there were at least three that stayed in and retired. Most of us left for
one reason or another but of the three, one was Eldon Rudd, who later became a
Congressman. And another one was Richard Wolf, Dick Wolf. He retired out of the
L.A. Office where his assignment for his last five or six years was liaison with the movie
industry including the TV show, This is the FBI.
P:
Oh right.
C:
He was the so-called expert they assigned, which was not a very enviable job. Because
as he told me, invariably, Hoover and Tolson would watch the show and if they saw
something they didn‟t like, he‟d get trimmed down. At any rate he…
P:
He would probably get some air-tel?
C:
Or maybe even a letter of censure.
P:
Getting back to your training when the twelve or fourteen of you went through.
C:
Yes.
P:
All the training was at D Street?
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June 9, 2009
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C:
No, no. We were given time to go out to lunch. Well, first off they swore us in. We were
sworn in, given our side-arm.
P:
Already?
C:
Yup, right; and our badge. And we were given the briefcase, the old briefcase in which
you kept your side-arm. Then we were loaded on a bus and sent down immediately to
Quantico. Of course at Quantico, it was the old building that we were put up in. I‟ll
never forget that very first night when the lights went out with taps, when we were on the
Marine base.
All the lights went out when taps were blown and I remember lying in bed listening to
these taps, and thinking, “What the hell am I doing back on a military base with a wife
and a kid back in New York City?”
Any way I went through my training. George Zeiss, at that time, was one of the trainers,
as best as I remember, he was still a special employee. After I finished training I got
assigned to Kentucky; Louisville, Kentucky was my first office.
P:
Do you recall how long the training was?
C:
Oh, I‟m trying, I don‟t remember. It seems we did half of it down in Quantico when it
was, of course, cold weather down there, and then we came back to Washington, D.C.
We were in the Ident Building where we underwent formal training; the learning of these
various laws, etc. that we were going to have to enforce.
P:
And all the administrative things you had to do?
C:
Exactly. And at the time we were given a list of boarding houses that had the Bureau
approval where you could stay. Eldon Rudd and I and Bill Daly, we roomed together in a
boarding house on East Capitol Street. Daly was an interesting fellow. Bill Daly had
been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. Eldon had been a Marine pilot. And, as I say,
it was a good group of guys since they all had been in the service and knew what it meant
to follow discipline. One day in training, we were ushered into the Director‟s office to
meet Hoover and shake his hand. Tolson stood behind him to the side.
When I finished the training I was assigned to the Louisville Office. But one thing I
should have told you when I first reported in, when we were sent down to Quantico, that
first time in Quantico, that‟s where we took our physicals.
I have a letter here dated January 26, 1950, signed by J. E. In those days he didn‟t say J.
Edgar, he signed his name J period, E period, Hoover. J. E. Hoover.
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John T. Conway
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C:
“Dear Mr. Conway, The Bureau is in receipt of the report of the physical examination
afforded you at the United States Naval Hospital, Quantico on January 11, 1950. This
report reflects that you are nine pounds under-weight, which the examiner believes to be
of temporary nature. In view of the negative physical findings and your history of a
recent loss in weight due to work, for your information the minimum weight standard for
a man of your age and height is one hundred and forty-seven pounds. Anyway, the Board
of Examining Physicians of the United States Naval Hospital reports that you are capable
of performing strenuous physical exertion and have no physical defects that would
interfere with your participation in raids or other work involving the practical use of
firearms.”
Now, as I told you, I had gone through law school and doing the three years in two years,
had held a part-time job and I had lost a lot of weight during those two years when I was
trying to study for the bar.
Normally there was a little Chock-Full-of Nuts place right across the street from the law
school and that‟s where I would get a small sandwich. I wasn‟t eating very well at that
time.
But at any rate I subsequently had to report my weight every three months and I got my
weight back so I was all right. Incidentally when I was going to law school at Columbia,
General Eisenhower was made President of the school of the entire university and a
house went with his job. Each morning as he would come by to his office some of us
would be around standing there and a lot of us being veterans, we‟d yell, “Hi, Ike.” He‟d
wave at us and laugh. When I graduated, as president of the class, I was the one to get up
and represent the graduating class. The whole university was graduating, all of the
schools including the law school, medical school and the various colleges. In any event, I
had the opportunity then to shake hands with General Eisenhower when he was President
of the school and that I really enjoyed.
Anyway reporting in at the Louisville Office there was a fellow in the office by the name
of Rawley Bristol. Rawley Bristol was an Agent but he was not a lawyer and I doubt
whether he even had a college degree. Rawley Bristol had been chief of detectives in
Owensboro, Kentucky. During World War II, there was a shortage of agents and a lot of
work for them. They took in former police officers who had gone through the National
Academy in Quantico and he had apparently been a pretty good detective and had
graduated and had been selected and gone through that training.
So Rawley Bristol had the job of breaking in every new agent coming into the office.
Rawley was pretty good. He was not good in writing reports. He had developed more
informants, particularly in the black community in Louisville, and had a good working
relationship with the local police. So he was kind enough to take me around to the local
police and introduce me. He always pointed out to them when he introduced me as a new
agent and that my father was a policeman. So that kind of broke the ice dealing with the
local police.
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C:
At any rate some of the interesting cases we had at that time when the big race, the Derby
race would come on, the racetrack was in Louisville, one of our jobs was to go and talk to
the local prostitutes. Rawley had the assignment and he took me with him and we would
interview the local prostitutes and develop them as informants. Because out-of-towners
would be brought in and this was in violation of the white slave law; so-called white
slave law. And we developed them, actually Rawley was developing the locals to keep us
informed because the out of towners were cutting into their business.
Also, the Bureau, the field offices would send into the Louisville Office a list of known
jewel thieves and other criminals that would come into Louisville during that Derby
period of time when a lot of people would come in; well-heeled people with money. So
we would have a list of those criminals to look out for and alert the local police.
C:
But any rate, after getting broken in by Rawley, then I became a road agent which was no
fun, particularly after the Korean War broke. When the Korean War broke, those of us in
the Bureau who were reserve officers, a large number of us were. I was in the Navy
Reserve. So we got a blanket, what do you call it?
P:
Exemption?
C:
Exemption, a blanket exemption for all of us who were in the Reserves. We then went on
a six day work week, and with my wife and child in Louisville. I became a road agent
leaving on Monday traveling all down through the southern part of Kentucky and
working my way up through the western part, getting back on Saturday. Then again I
was home for Sunday and then taking off again on Monday doing that. And it was no fun
particularly in the back hills of Kentucky - very few places to eat or good hotels.
The one exception was in Berea, Kentucky. [In] Berea, Kentucky there was Berea
College. The Baptist Church had built and operated Berea College for the youth of the
Appalachian area and it is a college of free tuition. But every kid who went there, boy
and girl, had to work. There was a little hotel, Daniel Boone Hotel, in Berea that was
owned and operated by Berea College and the students worked there, and no tipping was
permitted. At a dollar fifty a night for a room and that‟s if you wanted your own toilet.
But for a dollar a night, you could walk down the hall for one.
If I got within a hundred miles of Berea, Kentucky that‟s where I would head to stay; was
about the only decent place down through those hills.
P:
What kind of cases did you work on the road trip?
C:
Good question. We were still running deserters from World War II, so we had deserters,
stolen cars, some applicant cases and I had one fraud against the government. I had one
of those cases. What I ran into in Williamsburg, Kentucky on the border of Tennessee
were white slave cases.
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C:
We would stop at the various police stations at these little towns. The Louisville office
would have a list of various police departments that I would stop at as I worked my way
around during the week. If they needed to get any word to me that‟s where they would
leave word with the police department and, when I checked in, they‟d tell me they had
something for me.
In one case I got word that there was a car stolen up in Ohio somewhere and one of the
men working in the garage where it was stolen had also disappeared. So when I pulled
into this little town which was not on my normal route, I had to pull off to get to this little
town. The little town had a one man police force and I found him and he said, “Yup, that
kid‟s in town and that car is right in front of his mother‟s home.” He told me, “They‟re
good people.” He said, “But this kid, in this town nobody locks their door, except when
this kid‟s in town.”
So anyway we went over to the house, the police officer was good in the end. He said,
“Let me go in. I know the parents, let me go in and talk to them.” I said, “All right but
I‟ll go around the back in case he makes a break out the back.” So anyway it turned out
the kid wasn‟t there. The kid was on drugs and the father had, just that morning, taken
him up to Lexington where there was a drug rehabilitation. So I then put in a call to the
resident agent up in Lexington where they got him.
But, as I say, we‟re dealing with police departments down there, mostly two or three
people, sheriffs, and the sheriff‟s officers also. But it was down in Williamsburg,
Kentucky where I ran into one of the police officers [who] told me there was a retired
Army sergeant who told him that he thought local girls were being taken from their
homes.
Anyway he had a niece that was married and had left home with a note that she was
going to get a job as a waitress somewhere up near Chicago, and he said this didn‟t smell
right to him. So anyway it turned out this was beginning of several cases. I went over
with him to the home. This poor family, the girl was only about eighteen or nineteen and
she was married and her husband was there and living in a little shack of a house. A one
room shack and an uncle lived with them.
But anyway, that started me. I found out there was a group of girls, there must have been
about ten, that had left that area and several of them had come back and the gist of it was
that these guys would come down and offer these girls jobs, telling them they could make
a hundred dollars or more a week and they would take them. The girls would be
waitresses up in Cicero, Cicero just outside of Chicago. It was a town with a bad
reputation. And these poor girls would go up there with them and they would put them up
in a house and they would buy them clothes but they were in debt. They had to pay for
their transportation and then the new clothes they gave them and then they would charge
rent for board.
P:
More like indentured servants.
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C:
They never could get ahead.
P:
No.
C:
They never got ahead. And then their job was in these bars as b-girls trying to get the
guys drinks and eventually they were pushed into prostitution.
So I interviewed about four that had broken away and gotten home and none of them
would give me specific information; they were scared. They were very frightened. They
would tell me that something had happened to another girl….
P:
Right.
C:
… and then when I‟d get to that girl, they‟d say the same things. Oh no. They wouldn‟t
admit to anything. But they were obviously really frightened. So I finally got one girl to
testify; well she gave me a statement. I had a local sheriff with me and he was good. He
was - some of them weren‟t that honest but this was a real honest sheriff - and he went
with me. I wrote out the statement which she told me and she signed it and then I
witnessed it. I asked the sheriff to witness and he asked me would I step aside with him.
I stepped aside and he told me he couldn‟t read or write and he was the local sheriff there.
So it was pretty tough times and he was a good sheriff. I mean he was one of the honest
ones.
P:
So you got him to do an “X?”
C:
I didn‟t embarrass him to do that.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
I didn‟t embarrass him. I just let myself be the only witness.
P:
I see.
C:
However, one of the places they had taken her to beforehand was in Cincinnati and I had
included Cincinnati but I misspelled Cincinnati (laughing). So I got a letter back from the
Bureau. It was a letter of warning for two things: number one I got my wrist slapped
because I didn‟t seal her statement.
P:
Right.
C:
And there were some things in there that she told me that they thought….
P:
(Unintel).
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C:
Yes and I was warned. I should have sealed it because apparently as it worked its way
through the Bureau, but anyway I got my wrist slapped for that and also the fact that my
Cincinnati had not been spelled right.
P:
How long were you in Louisville?
C:
I got my orders to transfer to Washington, the Washington Field Office, just before
Christmas of that year, 1950.
P:
So you were just there?
C:
I was only there about seven months or so. But any way part of the time, also I was
assigned up into Lexington to help the resident agent in Lexington. One of the problems
he had was a lot of applicant cases because the University of Kentucky is up there.
P:
That‟s right.
C:
With the Korean War on, the government was hiring a lot of people all of a sudden. So I
spent time doing applicant work at the University of Kentucky.
But it was an odd thing. Lexington is a very expensive place to stay and the big horse
racing up in that area; horse farms. And the per diem I was getting didn‟t cover hotel
costs. So what I did do, I went over to the University of Kentucky and I found a listing of
the rooming houses for students so I then went into a rooming house and I paid for the
month. But our per diem at the time wasn‟t enough to carry you.
P:
No, no. So you were transferred to Washington Field?
C:
Washington Field. I was up in the resident agency up in Lexington and here again my
wife and kid were in Louisville and I was six days up there, so it was a little rough;
particularly on my wife and child. She didn‟t know anybody, so it wasn‟t that easy.
We did get involved in one bank robbery down in Paducah and it was just before I went
on the road and we broke that case. I was assigned, every agent except one or two that
stayed in Louisville, that wasn‟t a resident agent; we had a lot of resident agencies out in
these boon-docks. But anyway we got word that a bank robbery went down and it turned
out the fellow had come out of Chicago, had rented a car up in Chicago. Fortunately
some people had spotted him and you see in this little town of Paducah had seen an out of
town car and it was a guard at one of the prisons down there. He jotted down the number
and when we checked; we checked the number and found it was a lease car out of
Chicago and the guy who had leased it was out on bail on another federal offense. So we
were able to quickly identify him and a girlfriend in that area.
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C:
At any rate, within a couple of days, he headed back to Illinois but we found out where he
was going and identified; there were three of them involved. So that was one bank
robbery we solved.
P:
That‟s good. So then you were transferred late 1950 to Washington Field.
C:
In December of 1950, just before Christmas. So I hadn‟t had any leave all that time so I
took leave en route and spent Christmas in New York with my wife and kid, with her
mother and father. So that was nice and so I reported back into WFO, right after New
Years. WFO at that time was in the Justice Building.
In reporting in I found out that Guy Hottle was the SAC. Hottle had been a close friend
of Hoover. They had gone to high school together in the Washington, D.C. area and
Hottle was a year or two older than Hoover and apparently was a very good athlete.
Hoover really liked him. Anyway he had a good working relationship with Hoover.
The day I went in to meet him, I was there about the day before I got sent into meet him
and there were two other agents also with me going in. One was Harold Campbell who
had just been transferred in from Butte, Montana and that was my first meeting with
Harold Campbell who stayed and later became a chief inspector and was SAC in a
number of officers including Pittsburgh, New Jersey and ended up SAC in Las Vegas.
We became very close friends. His wife was a godmother to one of my children and I was
godfather to one of their children.
At any rate, there was a big problem on applicants at the time because, under the old
Atomic Energy Act anybody having access to nuclear information automatically had to
have a full-field background investigation. That was later changed, but at that time that
was a requirement. So I got assigned into the Pentagon with an older agent and two
special employees. There were four of us given an office in the Pentagon.
P:
Let me change the tape. Okay we‟re back again on side B.
C:
Okay, now I‟m being assigned over to the Pentagon. I was given an office and the other
agent and I, we spent our time going around doing the interviewing. The two special
employees were going through the military records to get data from the records. I found
myself interviewing high ranking officers; generals, admirals about other generals and
admirals in high ranking offices who had been involved in the nuclear program during
World War II. Of course it was kind of foolish because they would say, “Well, gee whiz
if you can‟t trust them now, it‟s too late.” And I said I agreed and I had to explain to all
of them that at the Atomic Energy Act we had no alternative and that it was a mandate for
us to do this and it was kind of a crazy law. But anyway so I spent about six months or
more on this assignment.
13
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 14
C:
But I not only covered in the Pentagon but I covered Navy Annex, the Marine Corps
Barracks and a place near, now is a national airport was where the engineering part of the
Army was stationed. Then Saturdays, we spent Saturdays in the Pentagon writing up our
notes.
But then the word got out that the Number 3 Squad, what we call the Espionage Squad,
the squad responsible for Soviet espionage, was going to be expanded. So I went and I
volunteered to go on that squad because the other agent working with me at the Pentagon
had about twelve, fifteen years in at the time and he did not want to go on that squad. He
kept telling me, “That they‟re gonna take more mature agents to put them on the squad.”
He told me, “It‟s a bad squad to get on because any reports you‟re working on invariably
went, not only to the Bureau, but went to the State Department and to other intelligence
agencies and, if you had anything wrong in it, boy you would get clobbered.”
So at any rate I volunteered and at first I was told no, I didn‟t have enough time in.
Anyway, finally I prevailed upon them to let me get in.
P:
At the Washington Field Office?
C:
Washington Field Office. So I went to the Washington Field Office Number 3 Squad, the
so-called Espionage Squad and had to go through some training. First off you had, like in
the service, to learn from photographs to identify various ships and aircraft and be able to
make an ident. We had pictures of Soviet personnel, which would flash on the screen and
you‟d just get a short shot at it because you didn‟t have much time to be able to spot
some of the fellows to be on the lookout on the Soviet Embassy and also look out on the
Soviet military attaché which was up on in the northwest, off Massachusetts Avenue.
At any rate after spending, I guess about a week, going through this training and some
other special training, I was then assigned to surveillance work. First I got assigned to
what we call PAT.
P:
Assigned to what?
C:
PAT (P-A-T), PAT. We had PAT and MIKE. Those were two lookouts on the Soviet
Embassy.
P:
Okay.
14
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 15
C:
PAT covered the front door and MIKE covered the back door. I was on a lousy
assignment on the back door where you had a very short period [of time], it was in a back
alleyway and very hard to spot them there coming in and out. But then in the lookout in
PAT you would have one guy assigned there who knew all the various individuals that
normally came in and out of the Embassy. Then about three or four of us would be legmen. So if we got a so-called “bogie” going in, somebody that wasn‟t recognized, then at
least two of us would go out the back door of the lookout and pick up the trail that this
individual was going and our job was to discreetly identify who the person was without
he or she knowing. We had different ways of making it possible.
One way - we had a lot of traffic cops in those days in Washington, actually directing
traffic - and one of the leg-men would get ahead and alert the police officer and say, “We
need to identify this person.” As they were crossing the street, he‟d stop them and claim
they had incurred some violation, some minor thing.
P:
Jay-walking?
C:
Jay-walking or something like that. He‟d get their identification and let them off on a
warning and that was one. Another way, if they came down by the White House in those
days there were photographers that would take pictures of tourists going by and then try
to sell them. They would get a picture, and in those days we didn‟t have the Polaroid, but
get a name and address where they would send the picture. At least, we‟d get the picture.
Invariably if they were willing to buy the photograph then we would get their
identification.
Now, some of these people didn‟t want to buy the photograph so out of our own pocket,
we would pay the guy for taking a picture and at least we‟d have the picture.
P:
Right.
C:
But eventually we had different ways of trying to identify who they were. But at the same
time things had speeded up quite a bit. I mean there was a lot of activity going on. The
Soviets knew, in those days, a government worker, if he was a homosexual, he‟d lose his
job. So they had a couple of their Soviet KGB guys; one particular fellow, good-looking,
blonde, xxxxx, was frequenting bars and places where the homosexuals hung out. And
anyway we picked up information on two individuals, one in the Army and one in the
State Department, who were homosexuals that the Soviets had gotten to know.
So we notified the State Department and the Department of the Army. The State
Department wanted to know what our sources were and we couldn‟t tell them.
P:
No.
15
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 16
C:
So then I got put in charge of trying to prove this guy was a homosexual without getting
compromised. So it was a helluva an assignment. Anyway we did. One night we had him
under surveillance and he picked up a young kid, took him up to his apartment, kept him
all night, next day we were able to get the kid and get a statement from him and this guy
in the State Department lost his job.
The Army one I don‟t know what happened to him because the Army Intelligence took
that one on. But there was a period of time, for about a week or so, when the two
homosexuals would get together and we‟d have the Army tailing their guy and we‟re
tailing the State Department fellow. So we were working kind of close together there.
Then there was another case. A White Russian woman who had fled Shanghai after
World War II claimed that she had been acquainted with a number of American military
officers from whom she acquired classified information and which in turn she turned over
to Soviet spies. She named a number of American military officers who were still on
active duty. She told the story to immigration officials at a time she was being deported
as an undesirable alien and the information was referred to the Bureau. Her deportation
was held up while her story was investigated by having her questioned under a polygraph
at the Bureau Lab. This went on for a number of days. My assignment was to lead
several agents in discreetly following her after she left the Bureau Lab. Each afternoon
and evening she would walk the streets to pick up men and take them to the Mayflower
Hotel on Connecticut Avenue NW where she was staying.
P:
Oh gee.
C:
At any rate one night, it was late in the afternoon, and she had gone into a place to dine
and we lost her. We had about three agents on her and we lost her. I wasn‟t sure whether
she‟d gone back up to her room or not. So I sent one of the agents up to listen outside her
room and I put a call from the lobby. And it rang and rang and I was just about to hang
up assuming that she wasn‟t there and all of a sudden the phone was answered and it was
a man‟s voice. So I heard a man‟s voice and I put the phone down and about ten minutes
later she came running down into the lobby. Well it turned out the guy was a boyfriend
of hers. I mean we found this out later but he had come in from Chicago and when the
phone rang and he picked it up. He suspected that it was some guy. But I didn‟t say
anything, but any rate he started to beat her up. So she goes running out to get a cab, next
I see a guy comes running out also, and she pushes him aside and she takes the cab and
he gets in another cab. So we followed the two cabs out to the airport. Well to make a
long story short, they made up at the airport. They came back and then went to a different
hotel.
Finally one time, and I didn‟t realize it until a day or two later, they were still
interviewing her down at Bureau Headquarters. They couldn‟t break her and they could
not make a determination on the polygraph. I later talked to the agent who administered
the polygraph. He told her she was lying. By his questioning she realized that she was
being followed.
16
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 17
C:
So anyway when she came out of there, and I was on her, she was as hot as a pistol. She
was looking for a tail and she made me, no question about it. But anyway she starts
screaming at me. She later was put under arrest to be deported. I was in during the
interview down at Washington Field Office just before they put her under arrest and she
recognized me and she said „I was nothing, I was just like a dirty Russian Jew‟
(laughing).
P:
(Laughing).
C:
She compromised one of the jailers and she got out on bail, and this guy had been one of
her jailers. She got a hotel apartment and taped him and so anyway I don‟t know what
happened but there was a big write-up about her in the rotogravure section of the
Washington Post that she was one of the toughest ones to keep a tail on.
P:
Do you remember her name?
C:
I don‟t remember her name at all.
P:
Oh.
C:
I don‟t remember her name. In fact there was a big picture of her, and a colored picture in
the rotogravure section but it really was the toughest; well I had a couple of tough cases.
There was leak in the National Security Council and Eisenhower, then the President,
called Hoover and told him, that he didn‟t care how, he said, “I gotta find out who that
leak came from.” And it didn‟t make any difference “how you do it.” There were five of
us Agents called in with the head guy on the Espionage Squad, a fellow by the name of
Obendorf. Have you ever heard of Obendorf, Obie we called him?
Obendorf had come into the Bureau as a German translator. His father had been the editor
of a German language newspaper in New York, who was anti-Nazi. Obendorf who
became an agent came initially as a special employee. He was a Harvard graduate. His
full name was Ludwig Wilhelm Rudolf Obendorf and he was one of the brightest guys I
think I ever interfaced with. He was the closest of being, of having a photographic mind
and he was head of not only the Soviet espionage but he had all the satellites. And he
was a hard working, very hardworking individual. The Assistant Supervisor, Courtland
(Court) Jones also was a great agent.
At any rate Obendorf called five of us in, and we were told we were going to have to
break this case and we were free to do whatever was necessary.
17
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 18
C:
The leak had been printed in a trade publication and it hadn‟t to do with espionage per se
but it involved a decision that was very important to be made in controlling oil. Two men
who ran this publication had an office in the Press Building. By that time I had Tass as
one of my projects, Tass, being the Soviet news agency. I had developed a contact with
the man in charge of the, maintenance man in charge of the whole Press Building.
At any rate that night we got into the building and into the office of these two guys and
we did what was necessary. One of the agents on this assignment was Obendorf who
personally came with us on the job.
P:
Gee.
C:
Harold (Red) Campbell, Bill Cregar, who later became an assistant director of the FBI,
and Charley Lyons, our technical man. But at any rate we were able to break the case.
P:
Do you have documents?
C:
No, nope. We just got the identity. We were able to pick up the identity of the individual
within the National Security Council who had given them the information.
P:
So you got an incentive award or a letter of commendation?
C:
Got a letter of commendation. Let me read it. This is how they handle it:
“I have noted with much satisfaction your excellent work while assigned to the
Washington Field Office in connection with the investigation recently conducted to
determine the origin of an unauthorized disclosure of information. You and fellow agents
contributed in no small degree to the success realized through your very effective
utilization of a certain special technique. I am pleased to commend you for your
noteworthy performance.”
P:
What date was that?
C:
August 1, 1955.
P:
Special technique?
18
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 19
C:
Yeah, special technique. That was August but previous to that in June, 1955, June 8,
1955, I received my first Letter of Commendation.:
“Your are to be commended for the valuable service you rendered in connection with the
conference held on May 23, 1955 with officials of another government agency for the
purpose of interrogating an individual concerning a matter of importance to the internal
security of our country. You and a fellow agent displayed excellent judgment as well as
unusual tact and diplomacy in handling this interview so skillfully and your performance
has definitely enhanced the prestige of the Bureau. I sincerely appreciate this
exceptionally fine piece of work.”
This was a source that the xxxx had and it was an arrangement made that we were to
interrogate him. The then liaison, Bureau liaison, with the xxxx official brought this guy
to our office. When I was alerted I was going to have to do it with the information we
were going to try get, I did a lot of work in the library in a certain area of where this
fellow had come from.
Anyway, during the interview, it must have been handled pretty well because the Bureau
liaison guy was very impressed. He wrote up what a [good] job I had done. The other
agent who wasn‟t actually involved in it; I figured I needed an agent with me, another
agent to verify, in case there was something that was claimed that I didn‟t do right.
P:
Right.
C:
And so he sat through it with me. He later became SAC out in Hawaii, but after it was
over and he got a similar letter like this, he said, “John, anytime you have another one
like this, you clue me in.”
P:
Was the liaison guy named Sam Papich?
C:
Yes, it was Sam Papich.
P:
Wonderful Sam Papich.
C:
A fine, fine guy, excellent Agent.
I had further dealing with Sam in one of the cases. If I ever deserved to get a letter of
commendation, I didn‟t. It was one of the most sensitive cases I ever had.
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John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 20
C:
By the time I was about a year or more on the Number 3 Squad, the Espionage Squad, a
large number of additional agents were added. Agents who had been in early enough
were assigned cases. On surveillances we would go out as individuals in charge of the
surveillance groups. The newer agents did nothing except surveillance. They did nothing
for eight hours or more, day and night except surveillances which sometimes could be,
you know you‟d be out a day with nothing to do, sitting in a car.
Now in those days in the summer time, you know how Washington, D.C., is in, in the
summer.
P:
Right.
C:
We had black cars, no air-conditioning. If you were sitting up an alleyway somewhere to
keep your radio going you‟d draw down your battery.
P:
Right.
C:
So you‟d have to turn on your car engine and the heat from the engines were unbelievable
and you‟d sit there and sweat and it was a tough assignment. So those poor agents that
did nothing else except surveillance work had a tough assignment. Agents assigned cases
would have maybe one day a week surveillance. When we went out we would be the socalled number three man in charge. The full time surveillance agents referred to us as the
“sacred cows.”
So I was number three man in charge one night and we would work until midnight
usually, I got word to call the office. It was in a code. So I call the office and they told me
that there was a fellow, a Russian former military officer who was being held at a safehouse by the xxxx down in Maryland and he had broken away from the safe-house.
However, before he broke away he told another Russian who was also at the safe-house
that he was going to go back to Russia and he was going to go to the Soviet Embassy. So
I was told to make sure we worked with PAT, so if he shows up there to let us know.
Sure enough PAT picks him up going into the Soviet Embassy.
It was about eleven o‟clock at night when he finally came out of the Embassy and he
starts running down Sixteenth Street so we obviously were waiting for him and then he
gets in a cab and the cab starts out toward Maryland. So I got about three cars on him
and, all of a sudden, the radio comes on and it‟s Obendorf over our radio calling and he
says, “Pick him up and bring him in.”
We had just lost the Judy Coplon case, a girl who had been in the Department of Justice
who had turned over information to a Soviet agent, written information, and she‟d beaten
the case because they hadn‟t gotten a warrant out. So when I was told to pick him up and
bring him in, I said, “Do I have authority to put him under arrest?” And the word came
back, “Pick him up and bring him in.” so I knew I had no authority.
20
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 21
C:
Anyway I got one of the cars to cut off the cab and one of my buddies, Bill Daly and I,
we pulled him out of the cab and threw him in the back of one of the Bureau cars. Bill
Daly and I took him in the back and arranged for one of the other agents to pay the cab
driver.
Anyway he was stunned, when we first pulled him out and we got him in the back of our
Bureau car, to bring him back into Washington. Well then he decided he didn‟t want to
come back and he starts fighting with us.
P:
Oh my.
C:
So here Bill and I have got him and he was a husky guy. So I finally got him down on the
floor with my knee on his head, holding him. We get into our field office [which] was in
the old Post Office building. I forget whether it was the fourth or fifth floor. So we get
him out; he‟s still fighting with us and we‟ve got him on a come-along hold, up the steps
into the old post office building. I remember the guard there suddenly looking at us and
we push him through, past the guard and onto the elevator. We get him upstairs and when
I get into our office there‟s Sam Papich, a couple of guys I don‟t recognize from xxxx,
and Obendorf.
So I turned him over to them and in the meantime my knuckles were kind of bruised and
he had kicked me in the shins, he had punched me in the jaw. At any rate we got him in.
So Sam, as I say, was there and they took responsibility for him; they took him. So
anyway the next morning I get instructed to go over to the Pentagon and check with a
certain office to get the details on this guy because apparently he had been picked up by
the Army over in Austria. The Army had brought him into the United States. I was to
get the Army records on him.
I go over to the Pentagon and I get sent from one office to another. It became obvious I‟m
getting the run-around. So finally I was in this one general‟s office and he said that
there‟s a phone call for you.” I said, “All right.” So I took the call and it was Deke
DeLoach, Cartha DeLoach from headquarters and he says, “What‟s the reason you‟re
asking these questions over there?”
Now you have to put it in perspective. These were the days of the McCarthy hearings.
P:
Right.
C:
The Army was very, very sensitive and they were taking a beating by McCarthy and Roy
Cohn.
P:
Right.
21
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 22
C:
So anyway I told Deke DeLoach whom I knew, I told him, “I‟m the one that picked that
guy up last night.” He said, “Oh, you were on the case last night?” I said, “Yes.” He said,
“All right, give me the general back.” So I gave him back the phone and all of a sudden
everything was opened up.
Anyway to make a long story short, this guy had never defected. In Austria in those days
we had the four powers, the Russians, the Americans, the English and the French and it
was divided up. Apparently one night this guy, this Russian captain had gotten drunk and
Army Intelligence kidnapped him and brought him into the states. He was flown into the
states and put under control of the xxxx, that‟s where he broke away from that place.
What they did was the next day they loaded him on a military plane, took him and
dumped him back into Austria. Whatever happened to the poor guy I don‟t know.
P:
Poor bastard.
C:
Poor bastard, poor bastard. I never felt so bad for the guy. At any rate, now that was such
a sensitive matter that nobody spoke about it, nobody did a damn thing, there was nothing
on the record.
P:
Nothing written about it?
C:
Nothing written about it whatsoever. So if you thought of all the various cases I handled
or I did, I mean that was one of the tougher ones and I get nothing. Some of these other
ones like that interview; I get a letter of commendation because it looked like I knew
what the hell I was talking about.
P:
Right.
C:
That was, so you never know which other ones you get. Now another one was the Dr. J.
Robert Oppenheimer case. I get called in one day by Obie, about three of us, to work with
an agent by the name of Taylor. He had a nickname Gook, Gook Taylor, and he was, oh
he‟d been in maybe about twenty years at the time. Well Taylor had the Oppenheimer
case. So we were called in and he said, “Oppenheimer‟s clearance was going to be taken
away from him the next day.” And we were to put a surveillance on him when he left the
Atomic Energy Commission.
This was very, very sensitive and all I remember being told, I or one of the other agents
asked, “Well what‟s broken? This case has been around for a long, long time. What‟s
new that this is going to happen?” And Taylor who had the case, he says, “Nothing new.”
What do you mean nothing new? Taylor kind of indicated that all the years he had the
case he never could get anything on him.
22
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 23
C:
But he says, “Admiral Straus had called Hoover and asked for this surveillance.” At the
time I didn‟t know who the hell Admiral Straus was. Now he was chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission. I later got to know him very, very well when I later got in
the atomic energy business.
But any rate at the time, we put him under surveillance when he came out; another agent
and I, three of us I guess, got him back to his hotel which was the Mayflower Hotel,
where there he met with an individual. He went to the men‟s bar and had a drink with
some guy who we were later able to identify as a columnist for the Washington Post. But
then he went up to his room where his wife was staying. Agent O‟Connor and myself
were assigned to the next room to Oppenheimer. So we were there all night long to be
sure that he didn‟t leave since Hoover had personally directed this surveillance at the
request of Admiral Straus. We figured we better not mess this one up.
So anyway the next morning, pretty early in the morning about seven thirty or so, he left
and went by cab up to Union Station with his wife. Of course we followed and we were
waiting for our relief. We‟d been out on this in the afternoon, the previous afternoon, all
through the night and now we‟re at Union Station where he‟s getting ready to leave. We
weren‟t sure where he was going but he was out of Princeton of course, but we weren‟t
sure. So our relief didn‟t show up. The other agent and I, we flipped a coin and I lost, so I
follow him up to Princeton. When I got up there one of the Newark, New Jersey agents,
we spotted each other quickly. I didn‟t know him and he didn‟t know me but we could
pretty well quickly spot an agent when you‟re on surveillance.
P:
Right.
C:
And I turned it over to him and so I didn‟t get back until later that afternoon. At any rate
that was Robert Oppenheimer. Some years later on, I met Oppenheimer twice; never told
him what I‟d been. Once in Geneva, Switzerland at a meeting and another time when
Kennedy, President Kennedy, awarded him the Fermi Award and they held the event at
the White House. I was one of those invited to attend. I was, in those days, Staff Director
of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
P:
You never told him you followed him up to Princeton?
C:
No, never told him I ever had any contact with him at all before.
P:
Was Oppenheimer; he was never arrested was he?
C:
Oppenheimer? No, he was not. In fact he stayed on at Princeton. He had an appointment
there at Princeton, at some special group. I forget the name of it now; and died of cancer.
But, no, he never was arrested. In all the time, I‟m convinced, I‟ve read his biography
and I read the files when I was still in the Bureau. His wife was a known Communist;
there was no question about her and his brother also.
23
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 24
C:
The best thing they really got on him, there was a Frenchman by the name of Chevalier
who was a Communist and who had approached him for information, classified
information, which he always claimed he never gave to him and there‟s no indication he
ever did.
P:
Yes.
C:
But the fact that he didn‟t report it, that was the best they got on Oppenheimer; the fact
that he was approached by Chevalier, a French Communist. But other than that he had a
brother who was a Communist and his wife got involved with varying Communist
activities. But anyway that was kind of a sad, sad situation.
During my tour in the Washington Field Office, I received orders for my first in-service
training. The classes then were held in the Department of Justice building. In one of the
class briefings, John P. Mohr, the assistant to the Director in charge of Administration,
addressed us. He discussed the possibility of a reduction in force that might take place in
the near future. He explained that new agents still on probation would be the first to be
let go and then those agents that were not veterans of the military. Many in the class
were older agents who had served in the Bureau during World War II and hence did not
have veterans‟ preference and, understandably, were concerned.
After Mohr had completed the briefing, I raised my hand and mentioned that I was from
WFO and we were putting in voluntary overtime as much as four and five hours per day.
I suggested that before any reduction in force be implemented that we have more agents
assigned to WFO and other offices and eliminate the expected voluntary overtime. In
those days we got no overtime pay and the provision for extra pay in lieu of overtime had
not been implemented. Mohr appeared to get angry and went into the spiel which he
purportedly had been known for. “If you don‟t want to put in extra hours as an Agent,
get a job as a show salesman.” Then he told me he wanted to see me when the class
ended. Since he was in charge of Administration, I had visions of getting a disciplinary
transfer. After the class, I met him in the hallway where he was waiting and he asked me
my name, which I gave him. Then he said to me, “You got guts” and left me.
On my last day of in-service, I was handed an envelope and instead of reporting back to
WFO, I was ordered to a special training in the Bureau to become an Inspectors‟ Aide. I
never knew but suspected that my selection was initiated by Mohr since this had been my
first and only in-service training. At any rate, when I finished the training, I was ordered
back to WFO.
There‟s one other thing I got. I think I mentioned I had the Tass assignment; that was one
of my subjects. I had an informant in Tass. He was a black man.
P:
An informant in Tass?
24
John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 25
C:
He was, yes. He worked for Tass. He was the only American working for Tass and he
had been quote “a member of the Communist Party” unquote. He had joined the
Communist Party in Hawaii during World War II or shortly after World War II. He
actually was an Army officer working for intelligence, undercover.
P:
Undercover?
C:
Undercover.
P:
Yes.
C:
And when he came back to the states he got in with the Communist Party, got into work
for Tass so he was my informant. And unless he had something to get to me I would
meet with him once a month and I would turn over to him his Army pay. He was then a
Major and he would turn over to me the pay Tass gave him. We would always doublecheck the monies and take a look at it to see where it came from so we were able to
identify it.
But anyway that was my job to do. Talk about a guy that really was helping the country.
He had originally been born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia and even then working
undercover. He would tell me that some of his old friends wouldn‟t deal with him
anymore and he said even, they would spit at him. He was married and his poor wife,
who knew he was a major, she couldn‟t make use of any of the military services. They
say they lived out in the southeast part of D.C.
Now these were the days when Washington was highly segregated. Periodically I would
meet him in a Bureau car and we would go driving somewhere away and even then it was
not normal to see a white and a black man together in a car.
P:
Right, right.
C:
And if I parked somewhere, it was also; so it was very tender. But the worse part came, in
fact sometimes when he had something to get to me, down in the basement of the press
building was a telephone, a public telephone. If he had something to get to me for, to get
copied he would go down and leave it there and I would go get it behind the telephone
booth. I‟d get it copied and then get it back to him the same way.
But then his wife asked to see me. She wanted a divorce. She couldn‟t live this way
anymore. I arranged for a meeting with Army Intelligence. Two intelligence officers in
civilian clothing met with me and I told them this problem. But before that when she
asked to meet with me, I needed to find a place to meet. Well I knew the manager of the
old Raleigh Hotel. The Raleigh Hotel used to be directly across from the post office
building where our office was and I had gotten to know him socially. So I arranged to get
a room in the Raleigh Hotel and I had her come meet me and the two Army officers.
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C:
Now I didn‟t find out about this until later, but apparently when she came into the lobby
one of their private security people spotted her come in and tailed her up into the room.
P:
(Laughing).
C:
Anyway he tailed her into the room and he figured she was a prostitute. When he went to
check to see who had rented the room and there was no record of anybody renting it. So
he called the manager who was not living there. The manager had a house in Arlington
and he called him at home and told him what had occurred, and fortunately for me the
manager said, “Don‟t do anything, just let it be.”
Anyway I convinced her that if she was going to claim because he was a Communist it
was grounds for divorce, she would be committing perjury. When it ended she left and it
was about two o‟clock in the morning. I figured well do I call my wife.
My wife knew I was on an assignment that night. I never called her or the Washington
Field Office. So I figured the room‟s here, I might as well use the damn room. So I slept
there and the next morning I checked in the office about eight o‟clock and Obendorf said
to me, “Hey you never checked out last night.”
And I said, “Yeah, thought I‟d finish what I had done.” He said, “Yeah but I get a call,
your wife woke about three in the morning and you weren‟t home and called the office to
find out what it was and the clerk on duty said there was no record of you checking out,
and no record of what the special assignment you were on.” So I got a little bit of trouble
on that one.
Well, anyway, in meeting with Army Intelligence, we decided to pull him out and did.
There was a ceremony (to which I was invited) in the Pentagon where he got the Legion
of Merit. The Army came up with another fellow to try to take his place, a nice new
young black officer. In fact he met me at my home with the other Intelligence officers.
They were willing to put him up as a replacement and I said, “No. I didn‟t think it was
worth it.” We weren‟t getting anything of any value and what it does to a man; it ruins
his career and so we said no, it wasn‟t worth it.
I‟d often thought of guys who had done so much for the country including this man and
what he had lived through.
P:
It was.
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C:
One other thing of interest occurred before I transferred from WFO to the New York
office. The Director had arranged with the United States Solicitor General to have a
number of qualified Agents to be admitted to the United States Supreme Court. Agents
who were attorneys and had been admitted to a State Bar for a period of at least three
years were eligible for selection. I was one of about eighteen Agents selected from the
field and from Bureau Headquarters. Eldon Rudd also was one of the selectees. On the
day of the swearing-in, I had a problem in that I was one of two Agents with a warrant
detailed to pick up an individual.
I arranged for the other Agent to wait in the car outside the Supreme Court until after I
got sworn in. I had my side arm inside my suit jacket during the ceremony and I hoped
the bulge wouldn‟t show. In those days there were no metal detectors to go through or
strict security.
After the swearing-in and having our picture taken with the Solicitor General, I got in the
waiting car and we headed for the pick-up which was to take place in the outskirts of
Washington. Part way to the location, I was notified by radio that I was to come to the
Director‟s office immediately.
We turned back and when I got to Hoover‟s office, I was told the other Agents who had
participated in the swearing-in ceremony were already in with the Director and had
shaken hands with him and that I was too late to go in. At any rate, I opened up the door
and went in just as the picture was to be taken with Hoover in front of the group.
Fortunately, the door I entered was behind the group where I could stand but not before
Hoover turned around and glared. While I didn‟t get a chance to shake hands, I did get
into the picture and received a signed copy of it.
P:
You didn‟t want New York did you?
C:
Oh no, not originally, but by this time I figured I was going to get out.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
I had gotten one letter of censure for ostensibly not taking care of government property
and it was a Government Transportation Request (GTR).
P:
GTRs huh?
C:
Yeah. And of course when you‟re doing surveillance work you never knew where you
were gonna end up and I would have it in the back of my pocket.
P:
Right.
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C:
Well anyway one night I was on the night, on this surveillance work. The next morning I
couldn‟t find my GTRs. I had all the agents going through all the Bureau cars we used
on surveillances that night thinking they had fallen out of my pocket.
Well I wrote a letter to the Bureau notifying them that I couldn‟t find them; they were
missing.
P:
Find the GTRs? Okay.
C:
Yes.
P:
Okay, let me change tapes here. Okay we‟re back again.
C:
So having reported them lost, one day my wife calls and tells me, “Do they look like a
bunch of checks?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “I found them behind some books. They
must have fallen down or one of the kids knocked them down.”
So I quickly get off a teletype to the Bureau that they were found, that they were not
missing, that they‟d been in my possession the whole time. Well, in the meantime
between the two communications I get a letter of censure for not taking care of Bureau
property; of not giving enough attention to Bureau property. Well it actually held me up
on a promotion.
P:
Sure.
C:
Guys who hadn‟t gotten letters of commendation and here, there were guys who were
doing nothing but applicant cases and had been with me in new agents class. They were
getting their promotions to grade twelve. Mine didn‟t come in. When I talked to Obie,
well how come? He went and found out. We had a good SAC at the time and he quickly
got on the Bureau to give me my grade twelve.
I had some close calls, and if something like this held my promotion up ... Some of the
assignments I got; I got locked one night in the Spanish Embassy.
P:
(Laughing).
C:
Another case involved a Soviet spy, actually he was in the Soviet Military Attaché‟s
office. He was Colonel xxxxx and he was very active. We finally got him declared
persona non grata. He was trying to get photographs of some key aerial shots. But
anyway we had lost him one night. We couldn‟t find where the hell he was. But
somebody picked up his car parked across the street from the Spanish Embassy.
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C:
So another agent and I went to see if we could see where he was coming from; get an
idea what he had been doing in this particular area. And it was pouring rain and there was
no place close except the parking lot of the Spanish Embassy so we went in there and
nobody was around. It was just pouring rain and we‟re watching. Well we finally got him
coming from a certain direction. We were never able to find out where he‟d been. But in
any event when we‟re getting ready to leave the Embassy the gates were locked.
P:
(Laughing).
C:
We decided, what the hell are we gonna do? I debated about busting through, wasn‟t
sure how badly the Bureau car would be smashed. And so finally I went and banged on
the door and got soaking wet and told them they had locked me in, that I‟d been visiting
somebody and they said, “Well you shouldn‟t have been in there in the first place.” So I
said, “No, somebody told me I could park in there.” Anyway I argued with him and he
gave me the key to open the gate and we got out.
So we got that out of the way. Then I was, another assignment, a very sensitive one, was
a Swedish guy who worked for the United Nations and he was in Washington, D.C. But I
get called in one day that I was to go out and interview this man.
He had told the State Department, an American State Department individual that he
thought the Soviets were trying to recruit him. He said there was this Soviet guy working
for the United Nations who kept trying to be nice to him, wanted to feed him and whathave-you. So he said, “I think they‟re trying to recruit me.”
So the State Department guy reports it to the State Department, they in turn call the
Bureau. In fact the guy even wrote a letter in which he stated he wanted to be, he would
be interviewed by the Bureau, by a Bureau agent but he was very sensitive and didn‟t
want, now I don‟t know if you get this, didn‟t want it to look like a regular FBI Agent.
So I get called in. I said this guy doesn‟t want to be seen by a way that would be
considered by a regular FBI Agent. And I said, “I get the case?”
(Laughing).
P:
(Laughing).
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C:
I said I don‟t know what the hell my future‟s gonna be in the Bureau. But any way I go
to the guy‟s home. I interview him and he gives me all the facts of why he thinks he‟s
gonna be approached and he tells me that eventually he wants to become an American
citizen. So I said, “Fine.” So I said, “Now when the Soviet, if he does approach you to do
something, will you immediately notify me?” and he said, “Yes.” I said, “Well now if he
wants you to do something, would you be willing to do it if we authorized it?” And I said,
“Now you don‟t have to. You don‟t have to do any of this. You‟re not required even if
you‟re an American, you wouldn‟t be required to do it.” “Oh yes” he said, “I want to
cooperate completely.” I said, “Well even then we might work, maybe get some things
that he wants. If you make that decision, would you be willing to work with us and go
back and forth.” And he agreed, “Yes.”
So that was fine. I went back and knowing the State Department was in it I immediately
got off a memorandum, gave it step by step, exactly how the interview had gone, and that
I had warned him that it wasn‟t necessary for him to do this.
Well about three days later unbeknownst to me he writes a memorandum, classified
memorandum. Well it turns out that Trygve Le, the head of the United Nations, calls in
our Ambassador and the Ambassador is Henry Cabot Lodge and shows him this letter.
This guys writes in the letter, a confidential letter to the head of the United Nations that
the Bureau had tried to recruit him. He had a meeting with me, names me, and then the
guy‟s English wasn‟t that good. But anyway he said in there that he had been pushed up
against the wall and he wrote it in such a way that it sounded like physically, I
manhandled him.
Henry Cabot Lodge calls the Attorney General who in those days was Rogers and Rogers
then calls Hoover. Fortunately I had gotten my memorandum over to Headquarters and
the order came to me that I was not to have any more contact with him whatsoever.
But, here again, you‟re handling some very sensitive stuff.
P:
Almost sounds like a set-up.
C:
Yup. It could have been. I don‟t think so. I think the guy was a little, he was a little
squirrely.
P:
Yes.
C:
Yeah he was a little squirrely. You remember in these cases we were handling there were
all kinds, they were very, very sensitive cases we were handling.
P:
Right and of course this was during an era where there was a Cold War. The Korean War
had just stopped or the armistice. So there was a real push to go after the Communists.
C:
Yes. Well and it was when McCarthy was going strong in those days.
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P:
That‟s right, that‟s right.
C:
And it didn‟t make our work that easy because we were getting a lot of cooperation that
all of a sudden people were not very happy with McCarthy and….
P:
Right.
C:
… and people who normally would have been sympathetic with us now were looking,
were getting reluctant to talk with us. So it wasn‟t that easy in some of these cases.
But in any event I did decide then I‟d go back to New York. I‟m a member of the Bar in
New York and I‟ll see what happens. But when I reported up in the New York Office, the
SAC up there was actually an assistant director. So one of the SACs, they had about
three senior agents in charge. So anyway I got in there and they asked me, they said,
“Well you have a pretty good background here and your experience and you‟re an
inspector‟s aide, what squad do you want to go on?” I said, “If I could have it I‟d like to
have a resident agency up in Westchester County.”
P:
(Laughing).
C:
(Laughing) They said, “Oh no, there‟s none open right now. You can‟t have that.” And I
said, “Well how about liaison with the New York City Police Department?” Because my
dad was still on the police department and I figured I could do that. “Nope, that‟s already
taken.” So then that‟s when the Communist group; they had skipped bail and they went
looking for these Communists that had been on trial and skipped. So they said, “How
about we put you on the Communist Squad?” I said, “I don‟t know anything about the
Communist Squad.” I said, “I‟ve worked espionage all along.” They said, “All right we‟ll
put you on a special detail on the Espionage Squad.” Which I did get that.
So I worked on it and there was a special they had; a specialist group up there. One of
my assignments up there was that whenever the Queen Elizabeth (the ship) came into
port, there was a Soviet courier working for the Cunard Line. MI-5 on the British side
followed this person in England and the Bureau when it came into the U.S. So whenever
the Queen Elizabeth came in, I‟d have a couple of agents down there covering it and that
went all during the night too and that‟s a rough place to work down around the docks.
P:
Sure.
C:
And so the first thing I did when I got the assignment, I made a contact with the officials,
the longshoremen union, to talk to them that we were going to have agents working down
there. I informed them it was a security case, not stealing. There was a lot of theft going
on in those days down in the docks and a lot of other stuff going on. I didn‟t want any of
the agents, including myself, getting a hook in the back working down there. So we put
on leather jackets and caps and hung around the pier, and we‟d be there all night long.
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C:
You begin to see how they shape up; how bad it shapes up and then they have these
uniform guards down there. They didn‟t see anything and one of them told me, he said,
“Look, you think I‟m crazy for the pay I‟m getting.” Because they were stealing. There
was something like ten percent, whatever five, ten percent would be stolen.
So any way I had that assignment whenever the Queen Elizabeth came in to New York.
P:
During that time you were starting to think of leaving the Bureau?
C:
Oh yes. At that time thinking in fact you never get that much and things were opening up
in the legal work. See I‟d been president of my class and every five years we‟d have a
reunion….
P:
Right.
C:
… and I‟d usually be the chairman of the thing and so I had contacts up in New York.
Then I got one letter of commendation while I was up in the New York Office and that
was for going to help a police officer. This is dated August 2, 1956 and now it‟s J. Edgar
Hoover. Now he‟s using „Edgar‟. Originally he was using J. E.
“Dear Mr. Conway I note that you performed with commendable alertness and presence
of mind in helping a local officer arrest one John Walsh, suspect in a probable burglary in
the early morning hours of July 26, 1956. I want you to know I sincerely appreciate your
action in promptly reporting the probable burglary and in going to the assistance of the
policeman. Your services are certainly in accordance with the Bureau‟s fine traditions.”
P:
That‟s great.
C:
Well how did it happen?
When I got to New York, I had two kids then, a wife and two kids, and I rented an
apartment up in Riverdale, nice section of the Bronx in a two-family house. My bedroom
faced the back area and a building was being built outside of my back bedroom and about
two in the morning I was awakened. It sounded like three or four guys talking but they
were breaking down material. What they were doing was taking down the copper, all the
copper work in the place. So I looked out, couldn‟t see anything out there; it was so dark.
But I could hear them talking and ripping stuff out. So I called the 50th Precinct. This was
part of my old neighborhood. So anyway I alerted them what was happening that I think
these guys were stripping the place and I told them there were a number of them.
Fine. Anyway then the next thing I hear a police car come, a patrol car, up on the street
behind me and I hear these guys yelling and start to run and I hear the cop yell and it was
only one cop and he‟s yelling at them to stop, stop. Anyway then they ran right past my
house down a wooded area and onto the street and then I heard some shooting started.
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John T. Conway
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P:
Oh boy.
C:
So I put my shoes on and I went running out and when I got about a half a block up from
my house, there was a police officer, a guy on the ground fighting. So I come quickly and
I identified myself as an FBI agent and I said, “I‟m with the FBI. Can I be of assistance
or can I help you, whatever?” And the cop said, “Yeah, please.” So I got in the battle.
I‟m fighting with this guy and the guy was about 250 pounds. So I finally get the guy in
a come-along hold and I‟m holding him and I told the cop, “Get the squeezers on him.”
These cops used to have squeezers, you just throw them on the arm and the cop tells me
he doesn‟t have any; he‟s a young cop.
So anyway now we got the guy and we‟re trying to walk him back to the patrol car,
which was up on the next block and up a sort of a hill through a wooded area. So anyway
we‟re fighting with this guy. We finally get him up and then some more cops came; some
people had heard the shooting and I‟m not quite sure what the shooting was. I think the
cop may have fired in the air or something. But anyway somebody did some shooting. So
I figured since there was a shooting or what-have-you, and the cop, his buddies came
When I was in WFO, I became good friends with another agent, Frank Cotter, who had
been a Marine Officer in World War II. We worked together on the espionage squad and
were neighbors in Park Fairfax in Arlington, Virginia. He had grown up in New York
City where his father had been a fireman and Frank had been captain of the track team at
New York University. Frank had resigned from the Bureau and taken a staff job on
Capitol Hill at the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. We continued to stay in touch
with each other.
One day he called me and said there were openings coming up on the Committee staff
and asked if I would be interested. I told him that I would be interested and he sent me
forms to be filled out for an appointment, which I completed and mailed to the
Committee. Cotter later became Vice President of Westinghouse Corporation.
So I came down and was interviewed by two Senators and two House members. Of
course this was the Joint Committee. There were eighteen members of the committee
handling all Atomic Energy matters. And there were two Republicans, a Democrat and a
Republican Senator and a Democrat and Republican House member and they constituted
a committee of four.
So I was interviewed by them. Well it turned out one of the Senators, Senator Anderson,
his son-in-law had been an FBI agent. At any rate the first go-around there were three
guys that were selected. I was not. One was to be the chief, a new guy who was coming
out of the AEC; he was a General Counsel at the AEC and the other fellow was a friend
of a Senator on the committee and the third guy, what the hell, oh he had worked parttime for one of the staff guys.
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John T. Conway
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C:
Anyway so the first time around I got a nice letter, “Thank you but it was, come to let
you know.” So about a month later I did get a letter offering me a job on the committee
staff.
P:
That‟s when you left the Bureau?
C:
That‟s when I left the Bureau.
P:
And that was August 10, 1956?
C:
Gave two weeks‟ notice.
P:
Okay. And so you had to uproot your wife and your children and bring them down to
Washington?
C:
Back to Washington. If I had known this was coming I never would have asked for New
York. I would have stayed there. So yes, because I had to uproot them and come back
down.
P:
So you went to work for the Senate?
C:
Well actually it was a joint committee, although we were paid out of the Senate clerk‟s
office.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
So I was on the payroll of the United States Senate but they alternated every term, every
two years each Congress. The Senate would have the chairmanship and then the House
would have it. But it was only eighteen members and there were nine members from
each; nine members from the Senate, nine members from the House and no one of them,
either the House or Senate, the majority could only have one more number of the
committee than the minority. So it was very balanced. It was very non-political and then
that‟s when I started.
C:
It would have been August 13, 1956 that I got the appointment. In those days the
Congress; there was no air-conditioning in the Capitol Building and the Congress would
go out just before the fourth of July. So they‟d all be home for July Fourth celebrations
and they wouldn‟t come back until January of the next year.
P:
Oh gees
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C:
So we had that whole time to go through all the old files and basically on the military
because I was told I was going to have the responsibility for the military applications and
the civilian side, a couple, the other staff, some other staff members would have that but I
would be personally have the military because I had the military background. I had been
in the military and in the Bureau.
So I spent the time going through all the old closed hearings reading all the material and
what-have-you. Then I got to meet Frank Cotter who had gotten to know Admiral
Rickover pretty well; introduced me to the admiral. In fact had me out to his home with
Admiral Rickover for a social meeting and that‟s when I got pretty close with Admiral
Rickover.
And by the time the Congress came back in January I was pretty well read up and right
up to date on everything. „Scoop‟ Jackson, Henry Jackson from the State of
Washington, he was Chairman of the Military Sub-Committee of the Joint Committee. So
I worked very closely with Scoop Jackson.
Within a year I got appointed assistant director of the staff and then in, what did I say, in
September of ‟62, the staff director. The then staff director, Ramey, was appointed to the
Atomic Energy Commission. There was doubt whether I was going to be the staff
director or another fellow who had been there longer than I. Anderson and Scoop
Jackson backed me. Senator Hickenlooper who was a Republican member was backing
the other fellow and there was a period of time that neither one of us got selected. Finally
I got the appointment.
P:
And your job there at the Senate was looking after the Atomic Energy matters?
C:
All Atomic Energy matters in those days went through the Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy; that included the funding for the Atomic Energy Commission which we would
have to prove before it went to the Appropriations Committee and also then all of the
information on the atomic, the bomb issues, and what they were trying to do in the
hydrogen field, hydrogen bomb field, and obviously the nuclear Navy, and also activities
of the Soviets in the nuclear field.
The head of CIA, Allen Dulles, would brief the committee on what they knew of and
what was going on with the Soviets or if they had something special, CIA would ask for a
special briefing
.
We would have the laboratory guys coming in. Dr. Edward Teller at that time was
heading up the Livermore Laboratory or I‟d go down and visit Los Alamos and get
briefed there.
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John T. Conway
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C:
When the question of the limited test ban was coming on was a good question, “Could we
or not detect a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty if they actually had a test?” And
the Air Force in those days, all around the world had fellows monitoring. So just before
we got in the Limited Test Ban Treaty I went out with some Senators and Congressmen
and we visited every one of those Air Force sites and were able to write a report verifying
that we could detect it and that report was used then in getting the treaty through.
So yeah in those days hell I was travelling around the world and it was a good job, a very
good job.
P:
Did you, you were looking to leave the Bureau. You were tired of surveillances?
C:
No, no.
P:
It was a lot more money?
C:
No basically, the reason really was I felt I had been handling some sensitive stuff and I
had a couple of close calls. On something as minor as not being able to find my GTRs,
and getting a letter of censure and having my promotion held up, I figured, the cases I‟m
working anyone of them could backfire on me. In fact we had one agent that I worked
with had got held up because he had been given an assignment to interview McCarthy
and McCarthy didn‟t like the questions he got and wrote a letter of complaint to Hoover.
This guy gets a letter of censure and the SAC that gave it to him he said to him, he said,
“You know there‟s nothing you did was wrong. You did everything exactly right” and he
says, “I hate to have to give you this letter of censure.” I mean so I figured you know; and
I had a wife and kids ...
P:
Yeah, yeah.
C:
… and I didn‟t want to get sent out to Butte, Montana or Kansas City and, you know, be
in the dog house.
P:
Yeah because the, Butte, Montana was for all the…..
C:
Yeah well I used to kid Red Campbell. Red, he had come from there. But anybody that
ever said they served in Butte, Montana they‟d say, “What did they catch you on, what
was wrong?” and he swore, he said, he came out of Seattle, he worked in the Seattle
Office and then got sent to Butte and that‟s where he met his wife who was a secretary
and then get sent into the Washington Field Office; good guy.
Later on, the only reason he ended as SAC in Las Vegas was to clean it up a bit but also
his wife had developed bad arthritis so he asked for a hardship transfer to get sent there, a
warm climate. So that‟s how he ended up.
P:
Yeah. .
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John T. Conway
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C:
I enjoyed my work. I really enjoyed what I was doing but then I decided something like
that; I was getting too close to get caught in some real sensitive issue.
P:
How long did you work on the Joint Committee?
C:
I put in twelve and a half years.
P:
And after that?
C:
Well there was a fellow …
P:
I know we‟re getting away from the Bureau stuff. I think you have a very interesting
background that we should at least…
C:
Okay well.
P:
… find out a few of things that you did.
C:
Well there was a fellow that, by the name of Charles Luce (L-u-c-e). Luce had been
Under-Secretary of Interior and previous to that he had been, headed up the Power
Authority which was the utility, government owned utility out in the west coast. He had
been a lawyer, had also been a clerk to Justice, Justice Black. Justice Black, he had
served as a clerk for him before practicing law out in Washington, in the state of
Washington. But anyway I had gotten to know him when he was Under-Secretary and
head of the Bonneville Power Authority and he got recruited to be Chairman and
President of Con-Edison in New York and he went up there at a time the company was in
various kinds of trouble.
He called me one day after he had been up there about a year. I noticed when he first
checked in with the Chairman of the Joint Committee and then he called me and asked
would I be interested in coming up and being his executive assistant. Now he knew I was
from New York and by that time also they were having trouble with Mafia guys, having
trouble with some Mafia type unions, who were trying to organize first line supervision
in New York, and he knew I was a member of the Bar.
So anyway I talked with my wife and she was happy to be going back to New York
where her parents were and where she had been from. So I agreed to do that. However, I
was due - there was a commissioner of the AEC who had been invited to go to Russia to
view their fusion work and he had a former lieutenant colonel as his aide who had
worked for me and this was a fellow, a Jewish fellow, Rosen, who was a lieutenant
colonel in the Army, assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission. He had studied physics
under Fermi. He had been in World War II, gotten out but stayed in the reserve and when
the war started he got called back in, but they assigned him into the Atomic Energy
Commission.
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C:
However, he‟d been a signal corps officer and he was very knowledgeable on nuclear
weapons. Now they were going to send him into, back in the field as signal corps officer
and I thought that was…. Anyway I arranged to get him assigned to the Joint Committee
where he was one of my assistants.
When he retired, one of the agency commissioners took him on as his aide. This
commissioner was going to go to Russia and Rosen called me and said, “Hey would you
want to come with us? Come on with us, the Commissioners would like to have you.” So
I talked to the chairman and he said okay. So this was just before then I was going to
Con-Edison. So I talked to Luce and I said, “Look I‟ve got one more thing to do and I
think I‟d like to do it and that is, go on this Russian trip.” So he said, “That‟s fine.”
So I did go on the trip. We actually went into Siberia to Novosibirsk which is like their
Los Alamos. I‟ll never forget when we got in there, we‟re in the middle of Siberia and
we were assigned a room in a very modern type of hotel type place. When I go in my
room and there in the place is a telephone book and I can‟t read Russian but I could see
the font is alphabetical and the back is broken down into departments, different agencies.
So I knew from work from espionage in Washington Field that we had one copy of a
telephone book which was held at Bureau Headquarters which was about five, six, seven
years old. A lot of times we used to check on things and I kept thinking if I, you know,
could take that thing back. So I didn‟t know what the hell. So I called Rosen in and I
pointed to him and his eyes opened wide.
So we had to go to some meetings and I decided I‟m not going to do anything; just let it
sit there and neither one of them in their rooms had a telephone book. So we went to
whatever meeting we had to go to. By the time I got back to my room it was gone. So I
never knew whether they had planted it there to see what I would do or what.
P:
Right.
C:
So anyway I never knew on that. But we visited there and saw the fusion work they were
doing and then we arranged to go to different other laboratories around the Soviet Union.
But it was a good trip.
C:
Then when I got back, before going up to New York, I went with my family down to
Rehoboth Beach and boy it was rough weather and my wife told me, she said, I was late
getting down to the beach, I don‟t know what I was doing, but when I got down there
with the kids; it was around September. But anyway my wife said, “The guards said,
„don‟t let the kids go in the water it‟s too rough.‟” She didn‟t tell me he said, “Don‟t let
anybody go in the water.” So I went in the water and boy I got bounced around and I
ended up I broke my kneecap.
So I had a little bit of a problem there. So when I reported up to New York, I was on
crutches.
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John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 39
P:
Yes, [like] Sotomayor.
C:
Yes. So that‟s how I went to work for Con-Ed.
P:
And you were with Con-Ed how long?
C:
The first time I was there ten years.
P:
Oh okay, geez.
C:
Ten years with Luce. I wasn‟t there but two weeks when we had a strike and that was a
little rough. But we went through the strike and then I was asked if I would become
president of a nuclear organization in Washington, D.C., which all of Westinghouse,
G.E., combustion engineers as well as all the companies, electric companies that had
nuclear plants, where they belonged to and it was to try to get some legislation through
the hill. So I became president of that.
P:
What was the name of that?
C:
Oh.
P:
The nuclear council?
C:
American Nuclear Energy Council, ANEC (A-N-E-C), American Nuclear Energy
Council. I headed it up for four years and got through the piece of legislation that
everyone wanted. In the meantime, Luce had retired. Also when I was up there I was
also, under Luce, I was chairman of the safety board at Indian Point. We had three
nuclear reactors, two under construction at the time and one being operated.
So I was chairman of that safety group and then I spent four years down at ANEC. Then
there was a new president now up at Con-Edison and after I was down there two years,
two years at ANEC he called me one day; would I come back up, back to Con Edison and
I told him I had to get this piece of legislation through.
Anyway at the end of four years, he called me again after I got the legislation through;
would I come back, as executive vice president. So I did and I spent seven years as
Executive Vice President of Con-Edison. Then I hit mandatory retirement, and also
while I was doing those seven years I was Chairman of ANEC which is a non-paying job
but I chaired it, and had another fellow who had worked for me, was president then.
But at any rate I ended up, when I hit the age of sixty-five it was mandatory retirement.
So I took mandatory retirement.
P:
I see in the society directory that you‟re chairman of a council now, a nuclear?
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John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 40
C:
Yes. I‟ve stayed very active in the nuclear field.
P:
Okay.
C:
I‟ll tell you what did happen. Initially I was approached and I became chairman of a new
form of board, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. It was a board set up
covering all the military work in the nuclear in the Department of Energy. I was
appointed by Bush Senior, for a term of five years and reappointed by Bill Clinton with
Senate confirmation.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
And which the deal read, you know, the Atomic Energy Commission was split up and
weapons were taken away from it and given to the Department of Energy.
P:
Right.
C:
And then the Department of Energy; this board was set up to have oversight of the new
DOE‟s work in the military field. So that included coverage of Los Alamos and
Livermore and any of the nuclear weapons, when they were taking them apart. So we did
have oversight of that.
P:
And all that time there you maintained contact with probably a lot of Bureau people….
C:
Oh yes.
P:
(unintel) starting the nuclear side.
C:
In fact, for example at one point I had to see Scoop Jackson. Well when I was out, after I
left the Bureau there was one good agent who had gotten in some trouble, but he had
been assistant agent in charge of Los Angeles Office and got busted. He now was an
agent in Seattle, and we were going to have a meeting with the then a general of the Air
Force and one of the nuclear weapons designers and Scoop Jackson. We were looking
for a safe place to have the interview. And the juror‟s room in the Federal Building at the
courthouse in Seattle I figured was a good place and I called and asked for the Bureau to
sweep it first, which they did. This agent; I alerted him that I was gonna do this and I
said, “Try to get in on it.” Then I wrote a letter with Scoop Jackson‟s signature thanking
Hoover for allowing this. He was one of the guys who got a letter of commendation.
P:
That‟s nice.
C:
Well, you try to help your friends.
P:
Of course.
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John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 41
C:
And then I stayed close with Harold Campbell. I used to go down to Las Vegas when we
were doing weapons testing.
P:
Right. Anyway you said you used to go to Las Vegas frequently.
C:
Yes and Red was the SAC there.
P:
Oh okay.
C:
So I would see him down there and later after he retired; he became vice president of
Caesar‟s World.
P:
Oh, okay.
C:
And I would go down there, when I‟d be down there for any of the nuclear testing,
nuclear meetings, I would usually see Red.
P:
Is he still alive?
C:
Red is yes. I get a Christmas card and I send him a card.
P:
Is he still in, where is he in Vegas?
C:
No, he retired and he‟s in Arizona. Of course I also stayed close with Eldon Rudd, and
when he was the Congressman he used to call me and we‟d have lunch together.
P:
Right.
C:
And then, what else? Oh then Bill Cregar who became Assistant Director and, after
retiring, he became a vice president for International Security for the DuPont companies.
But most of them, most of my friends that I was in the Bureau are all dead.
P:
Anyway I don‟t want to take up any more of your time.
C:
Okay.
P:
We‟re about finishing up here and I want to thank you on behalf of the organization.
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John T. Conway
June 9, 2009
Page 42
C:
Well, my pleasure; my pleasure. As I say, there‟s a lot of stuff I‟ve forgotten but, at any
rate, I enjoyed my time in the Bureau and, if I had it to do over again, I would have gone
into the Bureau. I think I got a lot out of it. I think, in fact some of the training I got in
the Bureau and experience I had in the Bureau definitely helped me in the later jobs that I
got. I‟ve always stayed close as a friend of the Bureau. I‟ve been a member of the ExAgents of the FBI for forty-five years and the Association of FBI Agents since its
inception.
In his book, The FBI Pyramid, W. Mark Felt refers to Edmund Mason when he was Chief
Inspector as one that the other Bureau officials and Agents in the field distrusted and
feared his powers. According to Felt, Mason “delighted in finding errors which he called
to Hoover‟s attention with recommendations for disciplinary action.” (page 45) Later
when Mason became an Assistant Director, I had a personal experience validating Felt‟s
appraisal.
While in the New York Office, I and several other New York Agents were detailed to
WFO on a six-week inspection. On the very first day, I was called into the office of
Inspector Morton P. Chiles and instructed to investigate allegations of unprofessional
conduct by the Number 3 Soviet Investigative Squad, my old unit. I was handed a copy
of a letter from Ed Mason to the Director allegations based upon a conversation Mason
had had with a new agent in the Washington Field Office whom he named.
Mason had no direct authority over Soviet activities, which was under the direct
supervision of Assistant to the Director, Allan Belmont, to whom he should have brought
the allegations instead of writing directly to the Director. I did not recognize the name of
the agent Mason had identified. First thing I did was to inform Obendorf of my
assignment and discuss the matter with him.
He explained to me that the named agent had been a clerical employee who had worked
under Mason prior to becoming a new Agent and Mason had invited him to his office to
congratulate him. Mason inquired if the young man had any thoughts on how to improve
the WFO work and the young man, with very little knowledge, made some comments. I
was surprised that Obendorf was protective of the new agent, who I thought was quite
naïve. At any rate, I looked into the matter which could have caused trouble for not only
Obendorf, the SAC and Allan Belmont. I completed my investigation of the allegation
and wrote my report which refuted Mason‟s letter to Hoover. Within a few months,
Mason was sent back to the field as an SAC and no longer was an Assistant Director.
P:
Well again, thank you so much….
C:
My pleasure.
P:
On behalf of the Oral History Project.
42