11. Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s:
COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence
Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and
disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.
The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however
formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971. The FBI’s stated
motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence,
and maintaining the existing social and political order.”
According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were
expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups
suspected of being subversive, such as communist and socialist organizations;
the women’s rights movement; militant black nationalist groups, and the
non-violent civil rights movement, including individuals such as Martin Luther
King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the
Congress of Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, and other civil
rights groups; a broad range of organizations labeled “New Left”, including
Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Weathermen,
almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, and even individual student
demonstrators with no group affiliation; and nationalist groups such as those
“seeking independence for Puerto Rico.”
The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to
marginalize and subvert “white hate groups,” including the Ku Klux Klan and
National States’ Rights Party. The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued
by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt,
misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these
movements and their leaders.
-----------------------------
COINTELPRO ( Source : [1] )
(an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program)
was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at
surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political
organizations.
The FBI has used covert operations against domestic
political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under the
official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. COINTELPRO tactics
have been alleged to include discrediting targets through psychological
warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting
false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; and illegal
violence, including assassination. The FBI's stated motivation was
"protectingnational security, preventing violence, and maintaining the
existing social and political order.
"FBI records show that 85% of COINTELPRO resources
targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed "subversive",
including communist and socialist organizations; organizations
and individuals associated with the civil rights movement,
including Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Congress of
Racial Equality and other civil rights organizations; black
nationalist groups; the American Indian Movement; a broad range of
organizations labeled "New Left", including Students for a
Democratic Society and the Weathermen; almost all groups protesting
the Vietnam War, as well as individual student demonstrators with no group
affiliation; the National Lawyers Guild; organizations and individuals
associated with the women's rights or L. Ron
Hubbard's Scientology movement; nationalist groups such as those seeking
independence for Puerto Rico, United Ireland, and Cuban exile
movements including Orlando Bosch's Cuban Power and the Cuban
Nationalist Movement; and additional notable Americans—even Albert
Einstein, who was a member of several civil rights groups, came under FBI
surveillance during the years just prior to COINTELPRO's official inauguration.
The remaining 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to
marginalize and subvert "white hate groups", including
the Ku Klux Klanand the National States' Rights Party.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives
governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and
their leaders. Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William
C. Sullivan. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, although himself the
target of FBI surveillance, personally authorized some of these programs.
History
The FBI engaged in political repression almost from the time
of the agency's inception in 1908, and antecedents to COINTELPRO operated
during the FDR and Truman administrations. Centralized
operations under COINTELPRO officially began in August 1956 with a program
designed to "increase factionalism, cause disruption and win
defections" inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). Tactics
included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that
would divide American communists internally.
An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI's
ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the
justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists. When
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in
1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately,
focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison,
and Martin Luther King, Jr.
After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, King was singled out as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure
from Hoover to focus not simply on communist infiltration of the civil rights
movement, but on King specifically, Sullivan wrote: "In the light of
King's powerful demagogic speech. . . . We must mark him now, if we have not
done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from
the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security." Soon
after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms.
Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began
"COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE", which focused on King and the SCLC as well
as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its
leader, Stokely Carmichael. BLACK HATE established theGhetto Informant
Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate
type organizations".
This program coincided with a broader federal effort to
prepare military responses for urban riots, and began increased collaboration
between the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security
Agency, and the Department of Defense. A particular target was
the Poor People's Campaign, a national effort organized by King and the
SCLC to occupy Washington, D.C. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on
a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine
support for the march.
COINTELPRO–NEW LEFT was created in April 1968, in the wake
of King's assassination in Memphis and mass student protests at
Columbia University.
The program ultimately encompassed disruption of
the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux
Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, theBlack Panther Party (1967),
and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included
antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the
Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO
began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings
limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident
groups..." Official congressional committees and several court cases have
concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups
exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional
guarantees of freedom of speech and association.
Program exposed
The program was successfully kept secret until 1971, when
the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI
field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and
exposed the program by passing this information to news agencies.
Many news organizations initially refused to publish the information. Within
the year, Director Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO
was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be
handled on a case-by-case basis.
Further documents were revealed in the course of separate
lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the
Socialist Workers Party, and a number of other groups. A major investigation
was launched in 1976 by the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly
referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank
Church of Idaho. However, millions of pages of documents remain
unreleased, and many released documents have been partly, or entirely,
redacted.
Since the conclusion of centralized COINTELPRO operations in
1971, FBI counterintelligence operations have been handled on a
"case-by-case basis"; however allegations of improper political
repression continue.
In the Final Report of the Select Committee, COINTELPRO was
castigated in no uncertain terms:
The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the
intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and
infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions
involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other
occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the
programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While
intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors
programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds
that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were
responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to
assure compliance with the law.
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a
democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent
activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a
sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of
First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing
the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would
protect the national security and deter violence.
The Church Committee documented a history of use of the
agency for purposes of political repression as far back as World
War I, through the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up
"anarchists and revolutionaries" for deportation, and then building
from 1936 through 1976.
Intended effects
The intended effect of the FBI's COINTELPRO was to
"expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize" groups that the
FBI believed were "subversive" by instructing FBI field operatives
to:
create a negative public image for target groups (e.g. by
surveiling activists, and then releasing negative personal information to the
public)
break down internal organization
create dissension between groups
restrict access to public resources
restrict the ability to organize protests
restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group
activities
Range of targets
In an interview with the BBC's Andrew
Marr, MIT professor of linguistics and political activist Noam
Chomsky spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO saying,
"COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of
petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four
administrations... by the time it got through, I won't run through the whole
story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the women's movement, at the
whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as
political assassination."
According to the Church Committee:
While the declared purposes of these programs were to
protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau
witnesses[who?]admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no
connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and
individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a
"potential" for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against
the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort"
to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.The
imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to
define the subjects of the programs.
The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor,
included "a great number of organizations that you might not today
characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black."
Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a
Black Nationalist-"Hate Group."Furthermore, the actual targets were
chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply.
The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors
of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities
Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or
deemed to be not sufficiently "anti-Communist". The Socialist Workers
Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were
cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group.
The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of
organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other
black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the
InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch
College ("vanguard of the New Left") to the New Mexico Free
University and other "alternate" schools, and from underground
newspapers to students' protesting university censorship of a student
publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them.
Examples of surveillance, spanning all presidents from FDR
to Nixon, both legal and illegal, contained in the Church Committee report:
President Roosevelt asked the FBI to put in its files
the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his
"national defense" policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh.
President Truman received inside information on a
former Roosevelt aide's efforts to influence his appointments, labor union
negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists.
President Eisenhower received reports on purely political
and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor
Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
The Kennedy administration had the FBI wiretap a
congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a
Washington law firm. US Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy received the fruits of an FBI wire tap on Martin Luther King,
Jr. and an electronic listening device targeting a congressman, both of
which yielded information of a political nature.
President Johnson asked the FBI to conduct "name
checks" of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent,
SenatorBarry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his
critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political
activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic
surveillance.
President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which
produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated
to national security, including information about a Supreme Court Justice.
The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBI's
intentions to prevent and disrupt protests against the Vietnam War. Many
techniques were used to accomplish this task. "These included promoting
splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists,
and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful
demonstrations." One 1966 COINTELPRO operation attempted to redirect
the Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the
antiwar movement.
The FBI claims that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or
COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics claim that agency programs in the
spirit of COINTELPRO targeted groups such as the Committee in Solidarity
with the People of El Salvador, theAmerican Indian Movement, Earth
First!, the White Separatist Movement, and the Anti-Globalization
Movement.
Methods
Body of Fred Hampton, national spokesman for the Black
Panther Party, who was killed by members of the Chicago Police Department, as
part of a COINTELPRO operation.
According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at
Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:
Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on
political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their
very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The
FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad
"dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. They planted false
media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name
of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and
made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and
events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated
or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to
cause trouble for activists.
Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system
to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law
gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for
false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax
laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance,
"investigative" interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to
intimidate activists and silence their supporters.
Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police
departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to
search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and
assassinations. The object was to frighten, or eliminate, dissidents and
disrupt their movements.
The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten
tension and hostility between various factions in the black militancy movement,
for example between the Black Panthers, the US Organization and the Blackstone
Rangers. This resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black
Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell.
The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many
U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia,
Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little
or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted
directly in the police killing of many members of the Black Panther Party, most
notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton on December
4, 1969.
In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they
considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police
departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not
commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them. One
Black Panther Party leader, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, was
incarcerated for 27 years before a California Superior Court vacated his murder
conviction, ultimately freeing him. Appearing before the court, an FBI agent
testified that he believed Pratt had been framed because both the FBI and the
Los Angeles Police Department knew he had been out of the area at the time the
murder occurred.
Some sources claim that the FBI conducted more than 200
"black bag jobs", which were warrantless surreptitious entries,
against the targeted groups and their members.
J. Edgar Hoover
In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover
that his investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) revealed that
in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily feeding breakfast to
children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the career ambitions of the agent
were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that
the BPP was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the
Government by revolutionary means".
Hoover was willing to use false claims to attack his
political enemies. In one memo he wrote: "Purpose of counterintelligence
action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist
to substantiate the charge."
In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, civil rights
worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen who gave
chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a
young black man; one of the Klansmen was acknowledged FBI informant Gary Thomas
Rowe.
Rumors were spread that Liuzzo was a member of
the Communist Party and abandoned her children to have sexual
relationships with African Americans involved in the civil
rights movement. FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally
communicated these insinuations to President Johnson. FBI informant Rowe has
also been implicated in some of the most violent crimes of the 1960s civil
rights era, including attacks on the Freedom Ridersand the 1963
Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. According to
Chomsky, in another instance in San Diegothe FBI financed, armed, and
controlled an extreme right-wing group of former Minutemen, transforming
it into a group called the Secret Army Organization which targeted groups,
activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement for both intimidation
and violent acts.
Hoover ordered preemptive action "to pinpoint potential
troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for
violence."
Illegal surveillance
The final report of the Church
Committee concluded:
Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government
agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often
undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political
beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on
behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through
secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps,
microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has
swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and
associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed
potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with
potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the
fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.Groups and
individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views
and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose
breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have
been employed -- including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt
meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups
into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served
the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.
While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high
officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally
initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they
had a duty to inform.Governmental officials -- including those whose principal
duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods
of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.The
Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled
intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated
the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising
intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight,
seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most
domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases
when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple
with them.
Post-COINTELPRO operations
While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971,
continuing FBI actions indicate that post-COINTELPRO reforms did not succeed in
ending COINTELPRO tactics.
Documents released under the FOIA show that the
FBI tracked the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
author David Halberstam for more than two decades.
“Counterterrorism” guidelines implemented during
the Reagan administration have been described as allowing a return to
COINTELPRO tactics.
Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI
informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement.
The FBI improperly opened investigations of American
activist groups, even though they were planning nothing more than peaceful
civil disobedience, according to a report by the inspector
general (IG) of the U.S. Department of Justice. The review by the
inspector general was launched in response to complaints by civil liberties
groups and members of Congress. The FBI improperly monitored groups including
the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh-based peace group, People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), andGreenpeace USA,
an environmental activism organization. Also, activists affiliated
with Greenpeace were improperly put on a terrorist watch list, even though
they were planning no violence or illegal acitivities. The IG report found the
"troubling" FBI practices between 2001 and 2006. In some cases, the
FBI conducted investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for
"factually weak" reasons. Also, the FBI extended investigations of
some of the groups "without adequate basis" and improperly kept
information about activist groups in its files. The IG report also found that
FBI Director Robert Mueller III provided inaccurate congressional
testimony about one of the investigations, but this inaccuracy may have been
due to his relying on what FBI officials told him.
Several authors have accused the FBI of continuing to deploy
COINTELPRO-like tactics against radical groups after the official COINTELPRO
operations were ended. Several authors have suggested the American Indian
Movement (AIM) has been a target of such operations. A few authors go
further and allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits
on the Lakota tribe's reservation land, and that this motivated a
larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine
Ridgereservation.
Others believe COINTELPRO continues and similar actions are
being taken against activist groups.
Caroline Woidat argued that with respect to Native
Americans, COINTELPRO should be understood within a historical context in which
"Native Americans have been viewed and have viewed the world themselves
through the lens of conspiracy theory."
Other authors note that while some conspiracy theories
related to COINTELPRO are unfounded, the issue of ongoing government
surveillance and repression is nonetheless real.
See also
Active measures
Agent provocateur
All Power to the People, film documentary by Lee Lew-Lee
1996
H. Rap Brown, targeted by COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO targets
Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI
Cold war
The COINTELPRO Papers
Cuban Nationalist Movement
William Mark Felt, also known as Deep
Throat served as chief inspector of COINTELPRO field operations
Howard Bruce Franklin, targeted by COINTELPRO
David Halberstam, targeted by COINTELPRO
Ernest Hemingway, targeted by COINTELPRO
Fred Hampton, targeted by COINTELPRO
Jean Seberg, targeted by COINTELPRO
Jeff Fort, leader of the Chicago street gang El Rukn,
was tried and convicted for conspiring with Libya to perform acts
of domestic terrorism by use of COINTELPRO type methods.
Viola Liuzzo, murdered by a shot from a car used by four Ku
Klux Klansmen, one of whom was a COINTELPRO informant
NSA call database
NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
Operation Mockingbird
Orlando Bosch
Police brutality
PROFUNC - a similar agency of the Government of
Canada
Red squad - Police intelligence/anti-dissident units, later
operated under COINTELPRO
Security culture
Morris Starsky, early target of COINTELPRO
State Terrorism
Surveillance
THERMCON
US Patriot Act
Weathermen
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