COINTELPRO

The word itself was the giveaway. On the night of 8 March 1971 a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the Bureau's small resident office in Media, Pennsylvania, and carried away its files. Copies went to newspapers and members of Congress. Some carried a routing caption nobody outside the Bureau had seen before: COINTELPRO^1,6.

An NBC reporter sued under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what it meant. The FBI decided "for security reasons" to end the programs, and on 28 April 1971 headquarters told its field offices they were over¹. Five years later the Senate's Church Committee published what they had been.

Counterintelligence turned inward

COINTELPRO stood for "counterintelligence program." The Committee called that a misnomer. Counterintelligence meant protecting against hostile spies; COINTELPRO took techniques the FBI had used against foreign agents and turned them on American citizens. The better term, the Committee wrote, was "covert action," and its report put the purpose bluntly: the Bureau "went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' target groups and individuals"¹.

The first program began in August 1956, against the Communist Party of the United States. Bureau officials told the Committee they had acted partly out of frustration after Supreme Court rulings made Smith Act prosecutions of party members nearly impossible. Four more programs followed: the Socialist Workers Party (1961–1969), "White Hate Groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan (1964–1971), "Black Nationalist-Hate Groups" (1967–1971) and the "New Left" (1968–1971)¹.

The labels hid how far the targeting spread. The nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was filed as a Black Nationalist "Hate Group." No one at the Bureau could define the New Left; its supervisor called it "more or less an attitude," and its targets ran from Students for a Democratic Society to all of Antioch College¹. The FBI's own published history now describes the programs as "rightfully criticized" for abridging First Amendment rights, while adding that they made up about two-tenths of one percent of its investigative workload³.

What the files showed

The Committee's staff read more than 20,000 pages of Bureau documents. The FBI had approved 2,370 actions out of 3,247 proposed, more than half of them against the Communist Party. They ranged, the report said, "from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader's Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers)"¹.

Other entries in the record included contacting employers to get targets fired, feeding derogatory information to friendly reporters, and asking the Internal Revenue Service to audit a professor to distract him from politics. At least four assaults were reported to headquarters as "results." The supervisor of one program, asked whether the absence of deaths from false informant labels was luck or planning, answered: "Oh, it just happened that way, I am sure"¹.

William C. Sullivan, who had run the Domestic Intelligence Division, gave the Committee the program's working creed:

This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred.

That testimony is quoted in¹.

King and the Panthers

The Committee published separate case studies of two targets. Against Martin Luther King Jr. the FBI waged a campaign it planned at a headquarters conference in December 1963. In November 1964, on orders that Sullivan said came from Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson, an agent flew to Florida and mailed King a composite tape from hotel-room microphones with an anonymous letter. King took the package as an attempt to drive him to suicide¹.

Against the Black Panther Party, field offices worked to deepen a feud with a rival Los Angeles group, US, in which Panthers were killed. In Chicago an FBI informant gave the Bureau a floor plan of an apartment used by party members, and the FBI passed it to local authorities before the police raid of 4 December 1969 that killed the local party chairman, Fred Hampton, and another member. A Bureau memorandum credited the informant's information as the basis of the raid¹.

Who knew

Secrecy was a rule of the programs. Orders warned that "under no circumstances should the existence of the program be made known outside the Bureau," and anonymous letters had to be typed on commercially bought paper. In May 1958 Hoover told President Eisenhower's national security assistant and the Attorney General that the Bureau had in August 1956 begun "a program designed to promote disruption" within the Communist Party, but described only informants and anonymous mailings¹.

Aftermath

A Justice Department committee under Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen reviewed the programs in 1974; Attorney General William Saxbe called most of the activity "legitimate," and the FBI Director, Clarence Kelley, defended it. The Church Committee disagreed. Its report found that the Bureau had conducted "a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association"¹.

In 1976 Attorney General Edward Levi issued guidelines limiting domestic security investigations to groups breaking the law or engaging in violence. By the FBI's own count, its domestic security cases fell from over 21,000 in 1973 to 626 by September 1976⁴. The FBI has since put large parts of the program files in its online reading room⁵.

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United States · 1908 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) The US Justice Department's investigative service, founded in 1908: chief hunter of foreign spies at home from the 1930s, and under J. Edgar Hoover the author of secret domestic programs exposed in the 1970s. 1895–1972 J. Edgar Hoover Director of the Bureau of Investigation and then the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. He built a modern police agency and a secret domestic intelligence apparatus that the Senate later condemned. 20 October 1967 – October 1973 Project Minaret From 1967 to 1973 the NSA searched international communications for the names of Americans supplied by the FBI, CIA and Secret Service, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and two sitting senators. 15 August 1967 – 5 March 1974 Operation CHAOS Pressed by two presidents to prove that foreign communists were behind the antiwar movement, the CIA built files on 7,200 Americans from 1967 to 1974 and kept finding no such proof. 1924–1984 Frank Church Idaho senator who chaired the 1975–76 Senate investigation of the CIA, FBI and NSA. His committee exposed assassination plots, COINTELPRO and Shamrock, and led to permanent intelligence oversight. 1940s–1990s Surveillance and countersurveillance Watching people was the core of Cold War counterintelligence, from MI5's watchers in the Portland case to KGB teams trailing CIA officers in Moscow, and the Church Committee exposed its abuse at home.