Jessie Gill Comes In From the Cold

JESSIE L. GILL was picketing outside Holyoke Center in January 1967, protesting what she termed unsatisfactory conditions in her Harvard-owned Mt. Auburn St. apartment building.

Members of the growing chapter of Harvard SDS approached her, she said, and offered their support. "I got frightened by those SDS kids," she said. "I didn't like people coming up to me on the street and tearing down the country. I decided to work for the FBI, but I went home and shook for a few hours afterward."

Gill said she contacted a friend of hers who was active in intelligence work in World War II. "He put me in touch with someone he knew in the CIA, and they referred me to the FBI," she said.

Gill thus inaugurated a three-year career as an informer, during which she says she funneled the names of "thousands" of radicals to the FBI. She also moonlighted for the CIA, she says, keeping the agency informed of the activities of area activists so it could protect its Technology Square office.

Gill says her relations with the two intelligence agencies were never idyllic--"I was paid one-third under the minimum wage by the FBI"--but they steadily worsened. She had a final falling out with the FBI in 1970, and the bureau "moved" her to New Hampshire, where she now quietly attends school, works in a local hospital, and is planning to write a book about her undercover experiences.

"If anyone comes to bother me here my neighbors will start shooting," she said. Gill is openly and sharply critical of the two intelligence agencies and appears willing to spill gradually what she knows about their operations. She apparently feels no shivers at coming in from the cold.

During her career underground, she came in contact with a wildly disparate set of personalities. The late J. Edgar Hoover, Harvard SDS leadership, conservative publisher William Loeb, Rep. James C. Cleveland R-N.H.) and Dean Whitlock all dealt with her in some way.

Whitlock and the SDSers knew her only as a bizarre butvocal critic of Harvard's housing policies in Cambridge, particularly in her own building, Hoover, Loeb and Cleveland came into the picture in 1972, when Gill attempted to get her back pay for telephone expenses she incurred during her shadowy career.

Certain aspects of her story strain credulity, primarily because neither intelligence agency has discussed Gill's work, other than the FBI's curt acknowledgement that she indeed informed for them. Gill herself, however, is part of the problem.

Thus far, Gill described her undercover work only in the vaguest sort of terms, although several bits of specific information she has provided have checked out.

She has refused to go into her methods of operation, what type of information she made available to the intelligence agencies, how or to whom she passed the information, or how much she was paid, other than that her salary was "under the minimum wage."

Gill has acknowledge, however, that she told the FBI that a woman secretary employed by Dean Whitlock was an SDS member, and she accurately located the Cambridge CIA office at 545 Technology Square.

Whitlock said the FBI called him unexpectedly in the summer of 1969 to warn him about his secretary. "I always wondered how the FBI found out" Whitlock said.

Three Crimson reporters verified Gill's tip about the CIA office. The agency maintains spartan quarters in Room 304 at the Technology Square address. No identifying insignia other than the room number were on the agency door or anywhere else in the office.

Gill said the CIA wanted to be kept abreast of the activities of Cambridge radicals because it feared for the safety of its office, which is indeed located in an area with a high incidence of militant demonstrations. Had the agency's location been public knowledge, bricks would undoubtedly have been heaved through its windows frequently in the past few years.

Although these two aspects of her story have been borne out by the facts. Gill has not elborated upon the rest of her story, and the extent to which her role as an informer affected events here in the turbulent days of militant confrontation remains clouded.

Both she and veteran SDSers agreed that she never acted as an agent provacateur, that she never suggested particularly militant tactics with an eye towards setting up the radicals for a police killing.

One SDS leader from that era said Gill was prominent in the organization and regularly attended SDS meetings and took part in the organization's campaigns, but was never taken seriously. "All our meetings were open, however, and there wasn't an awful lot she could have found out that would have been of much use to the FBI," the SDSer added.

Gill lost credibility, the SDS member said, because her Mt. Auburn St. Tenants Union turned out to be a paper organization. Other sources, including one of the building's tenants then, have echoed this view, explaining that Gill never lacked energy in her organizing efforts but that the other tenants refrained from participating because they considered her an oddity.

Gill sees no contradiction between her tenant organizing activities and her work for the FBI and CIA. She favours nonviolent social change, she says, and objected to what she termed the SDS reliance on militant confrontation and its unpatriotic attitudes.

"Everything I ever did was calculated to help the poor of Cambridge," she repeats insistently.

During her tenant organizing efforts. Gill came into contact with Whitlock, who was then serving as President emeritus Nathan M. Pusey's assistant for community affairs. Whitlock remembers her as the sincere but strange "major-domo" for the Mt. Auburn St. building, who brought deteriorating conditions in the building to his attention so that Harvard could take action.

Gill would oppose Harvard publicly on every conceivable occasion, Whitlock recalled, but in private she was "friendly."

"She would come into my office every day and read The New York Times and The Crimson because she said she was too poor to buy them," he said.

Whitlock said Gill would sometimes contact him before she was going to City Council meetings to criticize Harvard and tell him "not to be offended."

He said Gill, who always dressed in army surplus clothes when he knew her, sometimes gave him surplus Krations so he and his family "could survive for a few days after the bombing or whatever."

GILL APPEARS to have been a whirlwind of activity during those years. She ran for City Council in 1969, and appeared before it often to testify about Cambridge housing conditions. She once slept out on the City Hall lawn as part of her continuing protest.

Her community work meshed nicely with her SDS activity. The radical organization was becoming in creasingly involved in criticizing Harvard's role in Cambridge, and Gill, many observers say, served as SDS's primary link with the area outside Harvard Yard.

Several observers of the scene go so far as to trace to Gill one of the six demands of the 1969 University Hall takeover and the ensuing strike--that Harvard cease its alleged expansion in Cambridge and Roxbury. This seems a bit far-fetched, but Gill undoubtedly had some influence on the SDS community policy.

Recollections of Gill's role in the occupation and its stormy aftermath are hazy. Several observers did not recall her having participated in the actions, but a Crimson article reports that she was in the vanguard of a group of several hundred SDSers that stormed Pusey's Quincy St. residence a few days before the occupation.

Gill reportedly shoved a Harvard policeman out of the way, pushed open the gates, and led the crowd onto the wide expanse of lawn in front of the residence.

Gill herself recalled her role in the action, but argued that it was legal because she never strayed off public property.

At any rate, Gill became less visible after SDS acrimoniously split into two factions at its June 1969 national converntion. She said the FBI directed her to "oscillate between" the two Harvard factions, but she found the fluctuation between the two groups difficult.

Her grievances with intelligence work were peaking at this time, she said. Coupled with the increasing difficulty she was having garnering information, her complaints that the intelligence agencies were not paying her enough, were not understanding her concern for Cambridge's people, and were doing a "shoddy" job of intelligence gathering, prompted her to abandon her undercover work.

She left Cambridge sometime in the fall of 1970, when the FBI had her moved to New Hampshire, she said.

Then Gill's financial problems began. She said the CIA owed her $350 for the hundreds of phone calls she had made toagency offices over the three years, and she wanted to get paid.

She also appears to have wanted to publicize her exploits, ostansibly to effect changes in the shoddy intelligence gathering operations, but possibly with a growing desire for publicity of her own.

GILL APPROACHED Arthur C. Egan, chief investigative reporter for the Union-Leader, asking for help and lugging with her file cabinets she told him were loaded with the names of activists.

Egan said he listened to her story, but came to distrust her. "She could have taken those names from university telephone books for all I knew," he said.

Egan said he thought the FBI "tossed Gill 50 bucks every now and then," for her services.

After Egan turned her down, Gill approached Carol Morrissey, a Union-Leader correspondent in North Conway, N.H., who was more agreeable. Morrissey, who has since moved to Europe, approached Loeb of Gill's behalf.

"The boss is always willing to help out." Egan explained. "His thinking was that if she was an agent, she should be paid."

Loeb acknowledged that he "had taken the appropriate steps in Washington" to insure that Gill was paid for her work. Asked whether these steps included contacting New Hampshire's two Congressmen, he responded, "I know a great many Congressmen."

Loeb, who said he never met Gill, called her work "very healthy" and "a very good idea."

"In the late 1930s I penetrated the Communist Party on my own," Loeb said. "Anybody that says there is no such thing as the Communist conspiracy is crazy."

Loeb evidently approached Representative Cleveland, for The Crimson obtained a copy of a letter from Cleveland to Loeb referring to a letter from Hoover and asking if the Congressman could be of further service.

The Hoover letter, which The Crimson also obtained and which was verified by the Boston FBI office, acknowledged that Gill had worked for the FBI but claimed that the Bureau had paid her.

Gill explained that Cleveland had misunderstood and contacted the wrong intelligence chief. She said the FBI had paid her all along; the CIA was in arrears.

THE TWO letters were written in early February 1972. Gill said the CIA finally evened its accounts with her March 3, 1972, when she said two agency agents--including Cambridge agency chief Herman A. Mountain--traveled to North Conway to pay her the $350.

What happened between February and March to send the agency to New Hampshire remains unclear, but evidently more strings were pulled in Manchester and Washington. Neither Gill nor Loeb will describe how the mix-up was rectified.

Investigative reporter Egan has an interesting sidelight on the affair. He said Morrissey clandestinely tape recorded the transactions, that he has heard the tape although he does not know where "it is, and that the two men definitely indentified themselves as CIA agents.

"You gotta play sneaky with those boys too," he explained. "Carol took our office's 'Sneaky Pete' tape recorder to North Conway for the meeting."

The entire affair, even the means by which it was unearthed, is rife with people playing sneaky. The Crimson obtained the letters that revealed Gill's role and threw the fantastic case wide open because someone else must have played sneaky.

Playing sneaky is fun for little kids, but it loses its humor in what is supposedly an open and free environment. Gill comes out of the affair looking fairly quixotic, but the FBI and possibly the CIA appear simultaneously sinister and bumbling.

SDS has never been on the government's list of 'subversive' organizations, so the supposed rationale for spying on it is not present. The chilling effect of domestic government surveillance, now prominent with the unravelling revelations in the Watergate 'caper,' hardly needs documentation. FBI interference in Harvard's affairs, confirmed in the case of Dean Whitlock's secretary, may pale into insignificance beside electronic eavesdropping in presidential campaigns, but it is no less excusable.

Yet one marvels at how the FBI projects its own image onto that of its enemies, assuming that because it plays sneaky, they must also. J. Edgar Hoover himself could have appeared at a Harvard SDS meeting and gleaned as much useful information as Gill obtained. Her work was probably at best a minor nuisance to SDS, probably not worth the $50 the FBI allegedly tossed her every now and then. They surely could have invested their money more wisely.

Gill herself probably suffered most from the escapade. She probably contacted the FBI for a mixture of reasons: a sincere desire to counter what she was as the SDS threat to national security and an eagerness to enter the exciting world of espionage. The FBI callously used her, and seemingly gained nothing for its exploitation.

A former SDS leader provided perhaps the best assessment of Jessie Gill. "She was a lonely person who appeared to have no friends," he said. "She found a group of them in SDS."

The FBI could hardly have found easier prey.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Jessie L. Gill was a paid informer for the FBI and, she claims, the CIA between 1967 and 1970.

Vincent H. Rueul, an assistant special agent in the FBI's Boston office, confirmed that Gill had indeed worked for the Agency.

J. Edgar Hoover, the late FBI director, in a letter to a New Hampshire Congressman acknowledged that Gill had "furnished information" to his agency and that she had been "fully compensated for her services."

Rep. James C. Cleveland R.N.H.) apparently solicited information on Gill's behalf from the FBI about her financial status with the bureau.

William Loeb, the conservative New Hampshire publisher, approached Hoover and probably the CIA through Cleveland and other Washington officials to insure that Gill was paid, although he said he never met her.

Herman A. Mountain, the chief of the Cambridge CIA bureau, was named by Gill as one of two CIA agents she said traveled on March 3, 1972, to her North Conway, N.H.home to pay her $350 she said the agency owed her. Mountain, whom Gill described as an "innocent looking man with bird-like features," has refused comment on any aspect of the case.

Charles Whitlock, dean of the College, said Gillvisited him daily when he served as President emeritus Pusey's community affairs representative. He never suspected her connections with intelligence agencies.

Arthur C. Egan, the chief investigative reporter for Loeb's Manchester, N.H., Union-Leader, never trusted Gill's story.