COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at times illegal,[1][2] projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations.[3]

FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive,[4] including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders.[5][6] Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William C. Sullivan.[7] Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs.[8] Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so",[9] Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.[10]

History

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 the American communist organization internally.[11] 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.[12] In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South.[13] 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, eventually, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.[14]

After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, 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.[15]

Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms, as they now were aware that King was growing in stature daily as the leader among leaders of the Negro movement.[16]

In the mid-1960s, King began publicly criticizing the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States.[17] In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous November 21, 1964 "suicide package" sent by the FBI that contained audio recordings of King's sexual indiscretions combined with a letter telling him "There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation." And even by 1969, as has been noted elsewhere, "[FBI] efforts to 'expose' Martin Luther King, Jr. had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year. [The Bureau] furnished ammunition to conservatives to attack King's memory, and...tried to block efforts to honor the slain leader." [18]

During the same period the program also targeted Malcolm X. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was "directly" involved in Malcolm's murder, it is documented that the Bureau worked to "widen the rift" between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization," rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes; which ultimately led to Malcolm's assassination.[19][20] The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known.[21][22]

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), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam.[23] BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations".[24]

A March 1968 memo stated the program's goal was to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups" ; to "Prevent the RISE OF A 'MESSIAH' who could unify...the militant black nationalist movement" ; "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence [against authorities]." ; to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to...both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy..."; and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth." Dr. King was said to have potential to be the "messiah" figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism;[25] Stokely Carmichael was noted to have "the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way;" as he was seen as someone who espoused a much more militant vision of "black power."[26]

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. The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS.[27] 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.[28]

Overall, COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black 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 ..."[29] Official congressional committees and several court cases[30] 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.[1]

Program exposed

The building broken into by the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, at One Veterans Square, Media, Pennsylvania

The program was successfully kept secret until 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies.[31] Many news organizations initially refused to publish the information. Within the year, Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis.[32][33]

Additional 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. In 1976 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, launched a major investigation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. Journalists and historians speculate that the government has not released many dossier and documents related to the program. Many released documents have been partly, or entirely, redacted.

The Final Report of the Select Committee castigated conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations (including COINTELPRO) 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.[1] 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.[29]

Range of targets

At its inception, the programs's main target was the Communist Party.[34]

According to the Church Committee:

While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses 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:[35]

Groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations include

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 tried to redirect the Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the antiwar movement.[37]

Methods

Body of Fred Hampton, national spokesman for the Black Panther Party, who was murdered[38][39] by members of the Chicago Police Department, as part of a COINTELPRO operation.[40][41]

According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:

  1. 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.
  2. 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. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.[42]
  3. Harassment via the legal system: 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.[40][43]
  4. 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.[40] 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.[40]

Dhoruba Bin Wahad a former Black Panther, reflects on how these tactics made him feel, saying he had a combat mentality and felt like he was at war with the government. When asked about why he thinks the Black Panthers were targeted he said, "In the United States, the equivalent of the military was the local police. During the early sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and the human rights movement, the police in the United States became increasingly militaristic. They began to train out of military bases in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) supplied local police with military technology, everything from assault rifles to army personnel carriers. In his opinion, the Counterintelligence Program went hand-in-hand with the militarization of the police in the Black community, with the militarization of police in America."[44]

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 many members of the Black Panther Party, most notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969.[40][41][45]

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,[46] accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them. Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a Black Panther Party leader, 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 not been in the area at the time the murder occurred.[47][48]

Some sources claim that the FBI conducted more than 200 "black bag jobs",[49][50] which were warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members.[51]

J. Edgar Hoover

In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) had concluded that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent's career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means".[52]

Hoover supported using 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."[53]

In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, white 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 Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant.[54][55] The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement.[56][57] FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson.[58][59] 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 Riders and the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[54]

Hoover ordered preemptive action "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence."[5]

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 illegally 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 and biased 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 assaulted, repressed, harassed and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory, harmful 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.[60][61]

Post-COINTELPRO operations

While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971, critics allege that continuing FBI actions indicate that post-COINTELPRO reforms did not succeed in ending COINTELPRO tactics.[62][63][64] Documents released under the FOIA show that the FBI tracked the late David Halberstam—a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author—for more than two decades.[65] "Counterterrorism" guidelines implemented during the Reagan administration have been described as allowing a return to COINTELPRO tactics.[66] Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement.[67]

The IG report found these "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.[68]

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 these operations.

Authors such as Ward Churchill, Rex Weyler, and Peter Matthiessen 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 Ridge reservation.[69][70][71][72][73] Others believe COINTELPRO continues and similar actions are being taken against activist groups.[73][74][75] Caroline Woidat says 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."[76] Other authors argue that while some conspiracy theories related to COINTELPRO are unfounded, the issue of ongoing government surveillance and repression is real.[77][78]

See also

COINTELPRO targets

References

  1. 1 2 3 "I. Introduction and Summary" (PDF). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans - Church Committee final report. United States Senate website. II. United States Government. 1976-04-26. p. 10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2014-04-18.
  2. ↑ Wolf, Paul. "COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story". Archive.org. World Conference Against Racism, Durbin SA.
  3. ↑ Jalon, Allan M. (2006-03-08). "A break-in to end all break-ins; In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.". Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company. Archived from the original on 2013-12-03. Retrieved 2014-07-15.
  4. ↑ Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (208). The FBI. Yale University Press. p. 189. ISBN 9780300142846.
  5. 1 2 COINTELPRO Revisited - Spying & Disruption - IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE F.B.I. PAPERS
  6. ↑ "A Huey P. Newton Story - Actions - COINTELPRO". PBS. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
  7. ↑ Weiner, Tim (2012). Enemies : A History of the FBI (1st ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 9781400067480., p. 196. "Sullivan would become Hoover's field marshal in matters of national security, chief of FBI intelligence, and commandant of COINTELPRO. In that top secret and tightly compartmentalized world, an FBI inside of the FBI, Sullivan served as the executor of Hoover's most clandestine and recondite demands."
  8. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 233. "RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted. He personally renewed his authorization for the taps on Levison's office, and he approved Hoover's request to tap Levison's home telephone, where King called late at night several times a week."
  9. ↑ Herst, Burton (2007) Bobby and J. Edgar, p. 372.
  10. ↑ Herst (2007), pp. 372–374
  11. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 195
  12. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 198. "On October 2, 1956, Hoover stepped up the FBI's long-standing surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the field, warning that the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement."
  13. ↑ David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 148, 154–59.
  14. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 200.
  15. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 235.
  16. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 236. "The bugs got quick results. When King traveled, as he did constantly in the ensuing weeks, to Washington, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Honolulu, the Bureau planted hidden microphones in his hotel rooms. The FBI placed a total of eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs on King."
  17. ↑ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 524-529
  18. ↑ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999) p. 527-529
  19. ↑ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 243
  20. ↑ Gregory Kane, "FBI should acknowledge complicity in the assassination of Malcolm X" The Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2000
  21. ↑ Toure "Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr" The New York Times, June 17, 2011
  22. ↑ James W. Douglass "The Converging Martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, March 29, 2006
  23. ↑ "Guide to the Microfilm Edition of FBI Surveillance Files: Black Extremist Organizations, Part 1" Lexis-Nexis
  24. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 271.
  25. ↑ "The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO" American Social History Project, City University of New York
  26. ↑ Rob Warden "Hoover Rated Carmichael As 'Black Messiah'" Chicago Daily News, Feb 10, 1976
  27. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 272. "Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI. The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans."
  28. ↑ McKnight, Last Crusade, pp. 26–28. "By March the Hoover Bureau's campaign against King was virtually on a total war footing. In a March 21 'urgent' teletype, Hoover urged all field offices involved in the POCAM project to exploit every tactic in the bureau's arsenal of covert political warfare to bring down King and the SCLC."
  29. 1 2 "Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans". United States Senate. Retrieved 2010-12-01.
  30. ↑ See, for example, Hobson v. Wilson, 737 F.2d 1 (1984); Rugiero v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, 257 F.3d 534, 546 (2001).
  31. ↑ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/1971/
  32. ↑ "A Short History of FBI COINTELPRO", Albion Monitor, Retrieved July 13, 2007. Archived September 28, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  33. ↑ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 293
  34. ↑ The COINTELPRO Papers - Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall. South End Press.
  35. ↑ Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Final Report of the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities
  36. ↑ Various Church Committee reports reproduced online at ICDC: Final Report, 2A; Final Report,2Cb; Final Report, 3A; Final Report, 3G. Various COINTELPRO documents reproduced online at ICDC: CPUSA; SWP; Black Nationalist; White Hate; New Left; Puerto Rico. Archived January 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  37. ↑ Blackstock, Nelson. COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom, Pathfinder, New York. 1975. p. 111.
  38. ↑ Michael Newton. Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, p. 205. ISBN 1610692853
  39. ↑ THE CHICAGO CRIME SCENES PROJECT: FRED HAMPTON
  40. 1 2 3 4 5 The FBI'S Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party
  41. 1 2 FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose. M. Wesley Swearingen. Boston. South End Press. 1995. Special Agent Gregg York: "We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black nigger fuckers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark."
  42. ↑ Ward Churchill (2002), Agents of Repression (Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement ed.), South End Press, ISBN 978-0896086463, OCLC 50985124, 0896086461
  43. ↑ "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-Book III" [The Church Report], US Senate, 1976
  44. ↑ Bin Wahad, Dhoruba. Still Black, Still Strong. Semiotext, 1993, pp. 18-19
  45. ↑ Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. New York: Doubleday, 1992, pp. 204-06
  46. ↑ Paul Wolf, "COINTELPRO", ICDC
  47. ↑ "Former Black Panther freed after 27 years in jail". CNN. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
  48. ↑ In re Pratt, 82 Cal
  49. ↑ Alexander Cockburn; Jeffrey St. Clair (1998). Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. Verso. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-85984-139-6.
  50. ↑ FBI document, 19 July 1966, DeLoach to Sullivan re: "Black Bag" Jobs.
  51. ↑
  52. ↑ FBI document, 27 May 1969, "Director FBI to SAC San Francisco", available at the FBI reading room.
  53. ↑ FBI document, 16 September 1970, Director FBI to SAC's in Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Haven, San Francisco, and Washington Field Office. Available at the FBI reading room.
  54. 1 2 Gary May, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Luzzo, Yale University Press, 2005.
  55. ↑ "Jonathan Yardley". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
  56. ↑ Joanne Giannino. "Viola Liuzzo". Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
  57. ↑ Kay Houston. "The Detroit housewife who moved a nation toward racial justice". The Detroit News, Rearview Mirror. Archived from the original on 1999-04-27.
  58. ↑ "Uncommon Courage: The Viola Liuzzo Story". Archived from the original on 2006-02-23.
  59. ↑ Mary Stanton (2000). From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. University of Georgia Press. p. 190.
  60. ↑ "Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book II, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate (Church Committee)". United States Senate. Retrieved May 11, 2006.
  61. ↑ "Tapped Out Why Congress won't get through to the NSA.". Slate. Retrieved May 11, 2006.
  62. ↑ David Cunningham. There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI. University of California Press, 2005: "However, strong suspicions lingered that the program's tactics were sustained on a less formal basis—suspicions sometimes furthered by agents themselves, who periodically claimed that counterintelligence activities were continuing, though in a manner undocumented within Bureau files."; Hobson v. Brennan, 646 F.Supp. 884 (D.D.C.,1986)
  63. ↑ Bud Schultz, Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America. University of California Press, 2001: "Although the FBI officially discontinued COINTELPRO immediately after the Pennsylvania disclosures "for security reasons," when pressed by the Senate committee, the bureau acknowledged two new instances of "Cointelpro-type" operations. The committee was left to discover a third, apparently illegal operation on its own."
  64. ↑ Athan G. Theoharis, et al. The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999: "More recent controversies have focused on the adequacy of recent restrictions on the Bureau's domestic intelligence operations. Disclosures of the 1970s that FBI agents continued to conduct break-ins, and of the 1980s that the FBI targeted CISPES, again brought forth accusations of FBI abuses of power—and raised questions of whether reforms of the 1970s had successfully exorcised the ghost of FBI Director Hoover."
  65. ↑ The Associated Press, "FBI tracked journalist for over 20 years". Toronto Star. November 7, 2008. Retrieved November 23, 2008.
  66. ↑ Bud Schultz, Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America. University of California Press, 2001: "The problem persists after Hoover…."The record before this court," Federal Magistrate Joan Lefkow stated in 1991, "shows that despite regulations, orders and consent decrees prohibiting such activities, the FBI had continued to collect information concerning only the exercise of free speech."
  67. ↑ Mike Mosedale, "Bury My Heart," City Pages, Volume 21 - Issue 1002, 16 February 2000
  68. ↑ "FBI Probes of Groups Were Improper, Justice Department Says". The San Jose Mercury News. September 20, 2010. also reported at democracynow.org, 21 September 2010
  69. ↑ Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall, (1990), The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent, Boston: South End Press, pp. xii, 303.
  70. ↑ Churchill, Ward; and James Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, 1988, Boston, South End Press.
  71. ↑ Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against First Nations.
  72. ↑ Matthiessen, Peter, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Viking.
  73. 1 2 Woidat, Caroline M. "The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture", The Journal of American Culture 29 (4), 2006, pp. 454–467
  74. ↑ McQuinn, Jason. "Conspiracy Theory vs Alternative Journalism", Alternative Press Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, Winter 1996
  75. ↑ Horowitz, David. "Johnnie's Other O.J.", Front Page Magazine.com, September 1, 1997.
  76. ↑ Woidat, Caroline M. "The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture", The Journal of American Culture 29 (4), 2006. pp. 454–467
  77. ↑ Berlet, Chip. "The X-Files Movie: Facilitating Fanciful Fun, or Fueling Fear and Fascism? Conspiracy Theories for Fun, Not for False Prophets", 1998, Political Research Associates
  78. ↑ Berlet, Chip; and Matthew N. Lyons. 1998, "One key to litigating against government prosecution of dissidents: Understanding the underlying assumptions", Parts 1 and 2, Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report (West Group), 5 (13), (January–February): 145–153; and 5 (14), (March–April): 157–162.

Further reading

Books

  • Blackstock, Nelson (1988). Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom. Pathfinder Press. ISBN 978-0-87348-877-8. 
  • Carson, Clayborne; Gallen, David, editors (1991). Malcolm X: The FBI File. Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 978-0-88184-758-1. 
  • Churchill, Ward & Vander Wall, Jim (2002) [1988]. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against The Black Panther Party and The American Indian Movement. South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-646-1. 
  • Churchill, Ward; Vander Wall, Jim (2002) [1990]. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-648-7. 
  • Cunningham, David (2004). There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23997-5. 
  • Davis, James Kirkpatrick (1997). Assault on the Left. Praeger Trade. ISBN 978-0-275-95455-0. 
  • Garrow, David (2006). The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Revised ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08731-4. 
  • Glick, Brian (1989). War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-349-3. 
  • Hersh, Burton (2007). Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0786719822. 
  • McKnight, Gerald. The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People's Campaign. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. ISBN 9780813333847.
  • Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage Robert; Marwick, Christine (1976). The Lawless State: The Crimes Of The U.S. Intelligence Agencies. ISBN 978-0-14-004386-0. 
  • Olsen, Jack (2000). Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-49367-3. 
  • Perkus, Cathy (1976). Cointelpro. Vintage. 
  • Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
  • Weiner, Tim, Enemies: A history of the FBI, New York: Random House, 2012.

Articles

  • Drabble, John. "The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Mississippi, 1964–1971", Journal of Mississippi History, 66:4, (Winter 2004).
  • Drabble, John. "The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Alabama, 1964–1971", Alabama Review, 61:1, (January 2008): 3-47.
  • Drabble, John. "To Preserve the Domestic Tranquility:" The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and Political Discourse, 1964–1971", Journal of American Studies, 38:3, (August 2004): 297-328.
  • Drabble, John. "From White Supremacy to White Power: The FBI's COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE Operation and the 'Nazification' of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s," American Studies, 48:3 (Fall 2007): 49-74.
  • Drabble, John. "Fighting Black Power-New Left coalitions: Covert FBI media campaigns and American cultural discourse, 1967-1971," European Journal of American Culture, 27:2, (2008): 65-91.

FBI files

U.S. government reports

  • U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Internal Security. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Operations for Internal Security Purposes. 93rd Cong., 2d sess, 1974.
  • U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on Intelligence. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Programs. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
  • U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Hearings on Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders. 90th Cong., 1st sess. - 91st Cong., 2d sess, 1967–1970.
  • U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings — The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
  • U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings — Federal Bureau of Investigation. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
  • U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report — Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
  • U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report — Book III, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
  • Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26 (legislative day, April 14), 1976. [AKA "Church Committee Report"]. Archived at Archive.org by the Boston Public Library
  • SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES: Intelligence Reports and the Rights of Americans: Book II. April 24, 1976.
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