Telephone Terrorism

by Pat Watters

THE telephone rings its shrill of alarm at four o’clock in the morning. A young mother, her wakened child crying, drags out of sleep. Her husband is on a business trip. She picks up the phone with dread.

“Mrs, Jones,” growls a man at the other end of the line. “We know all about you and what you stand for. We know when your children leave for school and what time they get out and where they walk. So watch out.”

Ihis is telephone terrorism. Anyone involved in the public life of a community may get such anonymous, harassing hate calls. They don’t always involve direct threats. Indeed, the call to the young mother — whose family was subsequently guarded by police and private detectives — represents an extreme case. Often there is no sound at all, just the ring of the phone and an ominous click of disconnection when it is answered, this repeated again and again through a night or a month. Sometimes the caller is a “breather,” a person who breathes heavily into the phone until you hang up. There are also moaners.

In Atlanta, there is at least one screamer, a man who calls at odd hours of the day or night, and when you answer, he screams at the top of his voice and then quickly hangs up before you can scream back at him — as you are ready to after a few times.

Sometimes the caller, remaining anonymous, will argue whatever issue has moved hint to call. Sometimes he or she (the female is usually more venomous) will allude to whatever prompted the call, and then launch into unrelated accusations or insults. Often the call will consist of only one or two shouted epithets or curses. In Mississippi, a woman enduring a siege of hate calls picked up the phone one night to hear a nasal voice demand: “Do you want a one-way trip to eternity?”

Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution and author of a daily newspaper column about the South, listed telephone terrorism along with propagandists radio broadcasts as part of the pattern of harassment and hate which the recently founded National Council for Civic Responsibility seeks to combat.

“Your phone rings,” he said. “ They team up on you, and call up with sometimes vicious, sometimes insulting, sometimes filthy comment. Teachers are harassed, public officials are harassed, plain citizens are harassed.”

A high school football coach in a suburb of Washington Court House, Ohio, received hate calls as part of a year-long campaign of harassment. According to the ADL Bulletin, publication of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, his troubles started when he protested distribution in teachers’ mailboxes of anti-United Nations material and of an attack on psychological testing as a Communist plot.

When he continued opposing right-wing influences, late-night telephone calls from unidentified agitators began in earnest. “You’re a Communist!” the voices shouted. And the callers always hung up before he could answer. Finally, because of all the harassment and his feeling that school authorities weren’t backing him up, the coach and his family moved to another Ohio town.

Many public officials learn to take hate calls as part of the burden of office. “It’s just one of those things you put up with,” said a county judge who presided recently over a minor case involving a segregationist leader in the South and went through three weeks of nightly hate calls as a result. The calls finally subsided, but started up again when the segregationist leader was tried on another charge in an entirely different court.

Plain citizens often get their initiation as the result of writing a letter to the editor of the local paper and having it published. A lawyer recalled how this happened to him during the height of the McCarthy era. His letter had simply stated that McCarthyism subverted American principles as much as Communism did. “The calls that came in — you wouldn’t believe it.” he said. “I learned from this and subsequent experiences that I would have to decide whether what I wanted to say was worth subjecting myself to this sort of thing. They didn’t scare me out of expressing myself. But they made me more cautious about it.”

MENACING, bizarre, sometimes ludicrous, telephone terrorism is an underground part of the public life of America. It is much deplored but apparently little studied, and very little is being done about it.

Police tend to lump anonymous calls of all kinds together and frankly state that they are among the most difficult cases to solve.

Spokesmen for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company claim that complaints about anonymous calls are very few compared with other kinds of complaints. They take individual cases seriously and sympathize with the victims, but they do not consider that, in general, anonymous calls are a serious telephone problem.

No one, of course, really knows how many such calls are made. Complaints to the phone company or police may not be the best index. Victims often don’t report the calls because they know it is futile. Certainly in the past year, and particularly during the presidential campaign, people, including some syndicated columnists, who had never heard of hate calls became aware of them. And with so little being done to deter them, they seem more likely to increase than decrease.

There is a psychological horror about the calls that is hard to describe. Perhaps part of it can be attributed to the ingrained fear we have about stirring up trouble, of knowing that something we believe in makes others hate us. Or perhaps it is as simple as a policeman put it: “The calls scare normal people. Normal people are just not used to that type of abuse. The idea of that type loose on the streets scares them.”

Police handling of calls varies with local departments and situations. But the main fact is the difficulty of solving these cases. Hence the tendency to suggest ways for victims to cope with the calls, rather than to go after the callers.

Police Chief Herbert Jenkins of Atlanta, who is president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, told with a wry smile how the hate calls that come into his own home are handled.

“I never cut ‘em off,” Chief Jenkins said. “I just let ‘em talk. But the rest of my family adopted a policy years ago of hanging up on anyone who won’t identify himself. That’s the best way of handling them. Hang up. Cut ‘em off.”

Another police source gave this as the first advice he offers to people complaining about hate calls. He also suggests, as do the phone companies, getting an unlisted number, or, if that is impossible for business or personal reasons, subscribing to an answering service to screen unwanted calls.

Many people in public life, including elected officials, have the calls to their homes screened. The phone companies advise for this an automatic answering device. It has the advantage of allowing the victim to listen in for clues to the identity of the caller. But it costs about twelve dollars a month. To avoid sex calls, women are advised to list themselves in the directory by initials without a Mrs. or Miss prefix.

Police do work with the phone companies on anonymous calls when life or property seems seriously threatened. Four spokesmen for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in a conference interview stressed the fact that they consider anonymous calls a proportionately small problem. They said they had no exact figures on the number of complaints because the system’s companies don’t receive enough to warrant keeping separate records on them. Moreover, 95 percent of the complaints that are received do not prove valid enough for serious investigation. The great preponderance turn out to be cases where the caller is someone the victim knows, often quite well, even a member of his family, and the calls are part of a personal feud.

These spokesmen said they had noted no significant increase in the number of complaints in recent years, only an increase in publicity about them. They also said their records show no significant regional variations in number of complaints.

They advise keeping a log of the calls, noting down their frequency, the time, the kind of voice, background noises, and anything else noticeable. This may enable a victim to solve the case himself, or conclude he wasn’t getting as many anonymous calls as he thought.

Such a log can also be of aid to the police. In one city, a victim told how he always heard a bonging noise in the background of hate calls he was receiving every morning at exactly four o’clock. A detective, acting on a hunch about the bonging, checked out all the local industrial plants which changed shifts at 4 A.M. He found the hate caller at a phone near the company time clock.

When satisfied that they have a genuinely serious case of harassment, the phone companies will suggest police action. The customer must call the police, and the police must request company aid. “Then we do anything within our means to assist. We, of course, can’t apprehend or arrest anybody. And we don’t tap lines. We have the means, but we don’t use them. As far as we are concerned, they don’t exist,” one telephone spokesman reported. He went on to describe the great concern and precautions within the organization about respecting telephone privacy. Police Chief Jenkins had emphasized, too, that police don’t tap lines in efforts to get clues to the identity of a hate caller. “That’s something we just don’t do or discuss,” he said.

The general public always thinks of tracing calls as a solution. This was a relatively simple process in the days of the human telephone operator, who could, if alerted, note where a call came from. But with today’s automatic equipment, tracing is a time-consuming, labor-consuming process which at best is only partly certain.

Tracing a phone call takes ten to twenty minutes under the simplest conditions, and could take two or three days. Yet all the while, the connection must be maintained; if the caller hangs up during the tracing process, the hunt is over. This means that men must be standing by for the hate call, and the victim must somehow keep the caller on the line long enough for them to do their work.

There are still other difficulties. Finding the offending phone is not enough for court evidence. There must be proof of who made the call. The ideal way to establish this is to catch the hate caller in the act, take the phone from his hand, and talk to the victim at the other end of the line. Thus it is easy to understand why police and phone companies want to know that they are working on something serious before they attempt to trace a phone call.

In the meantime, telephone terrorism continues.

It is “a high price for a citizen to pay for the exercise of free-speech rights,” said Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern regional representative of the American Civil Liberties Union. He and others were cautious, however, about suggesting stronger legislation. Existing laws would suffice if they were enforceable. About half the states have directly applicable laws against opprobrious language.

More arrests for telephone terrorism and more publicity about the arrests would help. Such arrests are possible. In San Francisco, a Jewish family suffered fifteen months of virulently antiSemitic calls (“Why don’t you burn in a concentration camp?” “Hurrah for Eichmann. You’ll be next”) before police in 1960 finally arrested fourteen teen-agers who admitted making the calls “for kicks.” But according to the ADL Bulletin, it took a direct appeal by the family to the mayor to get the kind of patient and painstaking police work, with cooperation of the phone company, necessary to make such arrests.

As things now stand, people subjected to telephone terrorism are left pretty much to their own resources in handling them. Thus, the public could probably benefit from learning the various ways veteran victims of the calls have fought back at them, and survived them. Taking the phone off the hook or wrapping it in a towel, for example, are basic ways to frustrate the late-night callers.

A counterattack that has become a legend in the South involves Hamilton Lokey of Atlanta, who, as a state legislator in 1962 (he has since retired from politics), took a stand for desegregation of schools. Roy Harris, who has for many years aspired to be a behind-the-scenes boss in Georgia politics, was in favor of segregation. In a speech to like-minded citizens in Atlanta, he urged telephone harassment of those who disagreed. “Call ‘em forty times a day,” Mr. Harris rasped. “Call those people all night.”

At three o’clock on a subsequent morning, Mr. Lokey received a call from a breather. He recalled the moment recently. “I said, ‘thank you, you S.O.B,’ and hung up, and as I did, an idea occurred to me. I immediately dialed the hotel where I knew Roy was staying. I’d read what he had told them to do. The switchboard operator said three o’clock in the morning was an unusual time to ring up Roy, but I told her he was expecting me.

“Roy answered rather sleepily. I told him who it was, and he said howdy; we’d known each other for years. Then I said, ‘Roy, I just called to let you know your boys are at work. I knew you’d want to know what a good job they’re doing. And so help me, every time I get a call from one of them, I’m going to call you right then and report it to you.”

After this was reported in the newspapers, Mr. Lokey didn’t get a hate call for several months.

Blowing a shrill whistle into the phone has proven effective; police who get hate calls have done this. There are various ruses to frighten the caller into thinking he might be caught. A standard one is to say in an aside, “All right, Lieutenant, turn on the tracing machine. It’s him again.”A tape recorder beeping noise will frighten those sophisticated enough to know what it is.

Mrs. M. E. Tilly of Atlanta, who has spent a lifetime working for righteous causes, including heading a Southern organization of white womanhood against lynching, used to keep a record of the Lord’s Prayer by her phone to play to hate callers. The wife of a federal judge in New Orleans would always interrupt the hate caller as soon as he started, to say: “Excuse me just a moment, my little girl is on the other extension. Darling, hang up. There’s a sick person on the line, and I’m afraid he’ll say things you shouldn’t hear.” Usually the sick person would hang up.

Police and others with any knowledge of the phenomenon say that most hate callers are mentally sick. The “hate” in hate calls, a psychiatrist recently said, is the kind that derives from overemphasis of childhood strictures to be nice to everybody. The urge not to be nice stores up, and finally hostility breaks loose.

Sex calls usually express hatred by men of all women. In other types of calls, including terrorism, the emotion may be hostility against a father figure or all social authority, or homosexual hatred of all other men or women. It can also be an expression of a contagion of hatred, a searching for objects on which to vent socially sanctioned hatred of all Russians or Germans or Jews or Negroes or any other group.

Organized campaigns of hate calls operate along the same lines of motivation, with an added factor, according to the psychiatrist: a homosexual spirit of egging each other on to group action which eliminates the individual conscience.

As bad as they are to receive, hate calls serve a good purpose as a safety valve for the often tortured people who make them, the psychiatrist said. The calls provide all the satisfaction most of them need. They do not go from hate calls to something more dangerous. As police often tell frightened victims: “Don’t worry about the guy who calls and says he is going to blow up your house. The ones who really do it don’t call.”

The refusal to be afraid robs the calls of their purpose. As the wife of a city alderman put it, “Those calls make you sure you’ve got to take a stand. Somebody has to — or that kind will take over.”