USE OF POLICE INFORMERS

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27782, 6 October 1955, Page 11

USE OF POLICE INFORMERS

F. 8.1. Director Replies To Criticism (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 3. Mr J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said today that “vicious and sustained” attacks on the Government’s informant system v. --e inspired for the most part by Communists. Mr Hoover told the sixty-second annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that the use of confidential informers enabled the Government to expose the Kremlin conspiracy in the United States.

“That is why such a vicious and sustained attack has been made against former Communists who have firsthand knowledge of the secret, diabolical purposes of the Communist Party,” he said. Mr Hoover said that in recent years there had been a determined campaign to deprive law enforcement of the uses of informers, a method which he described as “as old as man” and first recorded in the Old Testament.

“This campaign of vituperation is oart and parcel of Communist strategy to convert the courtroom into a forum to discredit the judicial processes.” he said. “For the most part the technique of the smear has been devised by Communist lawyers skilled in concealing foul and despicable acts behind the Fifth Amendment.” Mr Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; told the meeting that a trained and loyal police force was the first line of defence against communism in countries near the Iron Curtain. Police forces throughout the free world must be on the lookout for surplus Soviet arms shipments to “selected, unscrupulous private vendors and used indiscriminately to foment trouble.” he said. Soviet exports of - -.rplus or obsolete equipment to nations under pressure to build up their military establishments was the Kremlin’s latest “Trojan horse.”