William Sullivan

Like a secret society, the American intelligence community keeps its secrets and protects its own--until they break the code of silence.

The deceased:  William C. Sullivan, former third-in-command under J. Edgar Hoover.  For a decade, he ran the FBI's domestic intelligence division which oversaw the Bureau's investigation of the Kennedy and King assassinations.  After Hoover summarily fired him in 1971, Sullivan became an active and effective critic of the Bureau.

How he died:  On November 9, 1977, shortly after daybreak, Sullivan went to meet two hunting companions near his Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, home.  He never made it.  On the way, he was shot to death by the 18-year-old son of a state policeman.  The young man claimed that even though his rifle was equipped with a telescopic sight, he had mistaken Sullivan for a deer.  Two months later, the killer received his sentence:  a $500 fine and a ten-year suspension of his hunting license.

SUSPICIOUS FACTS:

• Sullivan could have been seen as a threat to the FBI.  As the FBI'S illegal activities came to light after Watergate, a number of agents were brought to trial.  Sullivan was testifying against them.  At the time of his death, for example, he was scheduled to be the chief witness against John Kearny, an ex-agent indicted of illegal wiretapping.
• Sullivan was writing a tell-all book about his years in the FBI.  The book, called The Bureau, was eventually completed by his co-author and was published by W.W. Norton. 
• Sullivan was shot just a week before he was scheduled to appear before the House Select committee on Assassinations.
• In his book Conspiracy, Anthony Summers wrote "Sullivan had been head of the FBI's Division Five, which handled much of the King and Kennedy investigations...In 1975, Sullivan responded in opaque fashion to a question from a Congressional committee about Lee Harvey Oswald.  asked whether he had seen anything in the files to indicate a relationship between Oswald and the CIA, he replied...'I don't recall ever having seen anything like that, but I think there is something on that point...It rings a bell in my head'  Sullivan's fatal accident occurred before the Assassinations Committee could ask him to be more specific about that bell in his mind".

PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATIONS

It really was a hunting accident.  Sullivan's coauthor on The Bureau, Bill Brown, says that he flew to New Hampshire and checked it out--and was satisfied that it was an accident.

It was an assassination.  The day after Sullivan was shot, attorney William Kunstler called a press conference and postulated that the former FBI official had been murdered before he could blow the whistle on FBI operations connected to the deaths of not only Kennedy and King, but Malcolm X as well.  Some experienced hunters are also skeptical that a seasoned hunter with a telescopic sight could confuse a deer with a person.  Among other reasons, the hunter would have had to look carefully to verify that the deer was old enough--and the right gender--to shoot legally.