Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

being—the wiretaps, the investigations, the acute political sensitivity that caused the FBI Director himself to spend time scanning these wiretap summaries—were products of a side to King’s life that was clandestine even to him. From the point of view of the technicians and supervisors on the Levison surveillance, the operation of the bugs in particular was a painful chore. Unlike wiretaps, for which recorders could be activated automatically by phone calls, the bugs required continuous human monitoring. The sounds could be loud or maddeningly faint, depending on how far away Levison happened to be from the microphones in his wall, and the monitors faced the disadvantage that his visitors, being in each other’s physical presence, did not identify themselves the way callers tended to do on the telephone.