William C. Sullivan

William Cornelius Sullivan (May 12, 1912 – November 9, 1977) was an assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was in charge of the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971. Sullivan was forced out of the FBI at the end of September 1971 due to disagreements with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The following year, Sullivan was appointed as the head of the Justice Department's new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which he led from June 1972 to July 1973. Sullivan died in a hunting accident in 1977. His memoir of his thirty-year career in the FBI, written with journalist Bill Brown, was published posthumously by W. W. Norton & Company in 1979.

Sullivan led the highly controversial COINTELPRO aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations, political opposition and civil rights movements, which were, among other things, assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated or falsely charged with crimes.

William Cornelius Sullivan was born on May 12, 1912, in the small town of Bolton, Massachusetts. His parents were farmers in the area who worked a family farm there for fifty years. Sullivan later recounted that growing up in Bolton was a life without modern conveniences, including public transportation, school buses, telephone, mail service, or even electricity. Sullivan graduated from Hudson High School in neighboring Hudson and held advanced degrees from American University and George Washington University.^{[citation needed]}

Upon graduation, Sullivan worked for a time as an English teacher in Bolton before entering the civil service as an employee of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the agency's Boston office.

On July 3, 1941, Sullivan received a letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover offering him a position as special agent with the Bureau. Anticipating war in Europe, the young Sullivan had been working for the IRS prior to taking the FBI examination. He reported to the Department of Justice on August 4 of that year for training as an FBI agent.

There were two different sorts of agent trainees, Sullivan later recalled, those who had joined the FBI as clerks straight out of high school, when they were young, impressionable, and able to be trained to be fanatically loyal to the bureau and its leaders; and those like Sullivan who had graduated from college and developed a professional skill-set before enlisting with the bureau. "The pressure on a trainee to conform was unremitting," Sullivan remembered, with those questioning FBI policies or violating agency rules quickly funneled out of the system. In addition, ideological homogeneity was reinforced by the universal recruitment of Anglo-Saxon candidates, with African-Americans, Jews, and Hispanics excluded from the training program as a matter of official policy.

Sullivan successfully completed his training and on September 26, 1941 was assigned to the FBI's field office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In accordance with the bureau's policy at that time, Sullivan was moved from field office to field office during his first year on the job, being transferred to El Paso, Texas in January 1942, where he was mentored by Charles B. Winstead, the FBI special agent who had killed bank robber John Dillinger.

Sullivan was depicted as a realist by journalist Bill Brown, who collaborated with Sullivan in writing his posthumously published memoir, declaring at the time of their first meeting in 1968 that "only a tiny handful" of anti–Vietnam War protesters had ever had contact with foreign communist parties and that the American Communist Party was "no longer important". Calling Sullivan "a short, neat man who spoke logically and clearly," Brown likened Sullivan's demeanor to that of tough guy actor James Cagney, "with a New England accent thrown in."