The sleight of hand didn’t fool many people in the bureau, and it caused a good deal of resentment among some senior officials. To Robert Lamphere, one of the bureau’s chief specialists on espionage cases, feeding information to McCarthy undercut the legitimate hunt for communist spies in the government because “McCarthy lied about his information and figures. He made charges against people that weren’t true.” This served to discredit the counterintelligence effort by inviting ridicule, a point that seemed lost on McCarthy’s most powerful patron. “All along,” Lamphere noted, “Hoover was
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