COINTELPRO was originally
initiated against the Communist Party (CP) in 1956 the program expanded to
include civil rights groups and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) by
the time Kennedy became president in 1961. In fact Martin Luther King Jr.'s
famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March in Washington, before
Kennedy's assassination won him the FBI designation as “the most dangerous
Negro in the future of this Nation.” President Johnson, while expanding the war
in Vietnam and rhetorically battling the war on poverty at home, used the Black
inner-city rebellions of the mid-sixties from Watts to Detroit as a pretext to
issue. In August 1967, the FBI directed the covert action program code name
“COINTELPRO” towards organizations which the Bureau characterized as
"Black Nationalist Hate Groups in order to disrupt and neutralize the
alleged threat. The FBI memorandum expanding the program stated that its main
goals were to:
(1)
Prevent a
coalition of militant Black Nationalist groups and prevent the rise of an
individual who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist
movement. (It is said that Martin Luther
King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all fit this description.)
(2)
Prevent violence
on the part of Black Nationalist groups.
(3)
Prevent militant
Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by
discrediting them.
(4)
Prevent the
long-range growth of militant Black Nationalist organizations, especially among
youth.
COINTELPRO was the
brainchild of J. Edgar Hoover, the founder and director of the FBI from 1924
until his death in 1972. Shaped by the anticommunist hysteria in the aftermath
of the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, Hoover took part in the Palmer
Raids against radicals and spent the rest of his life in the service of
espionage and undermining suspected subversives of every sort. Contemporary
histories tend to focus on Hoover's maniacal egotism and closeted homosexuality
to explain his lifelong fixation on repressing minorities who fought discrimination.
Hoover's agenda was embraced by every president he served, including Democrats
Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Among the many targets of
COINTELPRO, the most serious attention was paid to those movements that most
threatened state interests. The most violent repression under COINTELPRO was
used against the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the
American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. It was
fueled by the state's need to preserve the near total political and economic
disenfranchisement of people of color in the face of the first serious threats
to the racial status quo since post-Civil War Reconstruction. The need of the
American empire to keep Puerto Rico in its colonial orbit, while it was losing
the war in Southeast Asia, drove the violent repression there and against
Puerto Rican immigrants in the United States.
Despite the small size of the
CP and the American SWP by the late 1950s and early 1960s, their members'
implantation in industrial workplaces, independent electoral campaigns,
desegregation, and antiwar activities as well as the bureau's fanatical
obsession with communism made them targets.
New Left activists who
were not only hampering the ability of the U.S. to fight in Vietnam, but also
challenging ideological assumptions about women's roles, sexuality and
segregation garnered attention and harassment by the state as well.
But the most disruptive
and violent COINTELPRO operations in the period from the late 1960s into the
mid-1970s were directed against the Black and Native American struggles. The
FBI, in close collaboration with local police units (sometimes called Red
Squads) used a number of techniques in its efforts to disrupt and destroy
leftist groups, the most important of which are enumerated here. It was a
general rule throughout the 1960s, that local police departments would devote
at least 1 percent of their resources to surveillance and infiltration. These
local agents partnered with their federal counter-parts, read the left-wing
press and became familiar with the fact that organized leftists were involved
in liberal and pacifist groups and that individuals were often radicalized by
these ideas as well as by their own experiences of struggle. The targets of this nationwide program to
disrupt militant Black Nationalist organizations included groups such as the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the
Nation of Islam (NOI).
It was expressly directed
against such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap
Brown, Maxwell Stanford, and Elijah Muhammad.
The Black Panther Party
(BPP) was not among the original "Black Nationalist" targets. In
September 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as
"The greatest threat to the internal security of the country”. He also went on to say that they were
"Schooled in the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the teaching of Chinese Communist
leader Mao Tse-tung, its members have perpetrated numerous assaults on police
officers and have engaged in violent confrontations with police throughout the
country. Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel
extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and
violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges,
universities and high schools as well." By July 1969, the Black Panthers
had become the primary focus of the program, and was ultimately the target of
numerous authorized COINTELPRO actions.
Although the claimed
purpose of the Bureau's COINTELPRO tactics was to prevent violence, some of the
FBI's tactics against the BPP were clearly intended to foster violence, and
many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence. For example:
the FBI's efforts to intensify the animosity between the BPP and the Blackstone
Rangers. Tactics included, sending an anonymous letter to the gang's leader
falsely informing him that the Chicago Panthers had a hit out on him. They
stated that the intent of the letter was to induce the Ranger’s leader to take
actions against the Panther leadership.
In Southern California,
the FBI launched a similar covert effort to create further tension in the ranks
of the BPP. This effort included mailing anonymous letters and illustrations to
BPP members ridiculing the local and national BPP leadership for the express
purpose of exacerbating an existing gang war between the BPP and an
organization called the United Slaves (US). This gang war resulted in the
killing of four BPP members by members of the United Slaves (US) in numerous
beatings and shootings. Although individual incidents during this dispute
cannot be directly traced to efforts by the FBI, FBI officials were aware of
the violent nature of the dispute which they hoped would prolong and intensify
the dispute. They proudly claimed credit for violent clashes between the rival
factions which in the words of one FBI official resulted in shootings, beatings,
and a high degree of unrest in the area of southeast San Diego.
Surveillance & violation of civil rights:
Numerous newspapers, black
and white have written about the government's eavesdropping and infiltration of
the American Communist Party. Far less is known of their COINTELPRO operations
against the largest anti-Stalinist socialist organization mobilizing in the
1960s, the American Socialist Workers Party. The case of the SWP is of
particular importance not only because surveillance and infiltration took place
over decades, almost from its founding in 1938, but because they turned the
tables on the FBI and put the Bureau on trial-and won.
In 1973 the SWP and its
youth group the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) filed a lawsuit against the
federal government (Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General) demanding
compensation for years of disruption, harassment, and surveillance of the
organization. Throughout the course of the discovery, trial, and other
proceedings which took place over thirteen years. Detailed information about
how and why the government violated the rights of lawful individuals exercising
their free speech and right to organize unfolded. In a historic rebuke to the
federal government's trampling on constitutionally protected dissent, Judge
Griesa awarded the SWP $264,000 in damages in 1986.
COINTELPRO operations
began against the SWP in 1961 when court records show they had around 600
members, 10 percent were FBI informants who were paid in excess of $1.6 million
over the years for their efforts. Infiltration began in response to the SWP's
electoral campaigns and desegregation and other legal activities. Over the
years, member informants supplied the government with membership lists,
financial records, budgets, minutes of meetings, mailing lists, and
correspondence. From 1961-1976 fifty-five informants held offices or committee
positions and fifty-one served on executive committees of the party.
The FBI played an active
role in attempting to discredit SWP candidates for public office. An example of
this was when John Franklin ran for Manhattan borough president in 1961 and
when Clifton DeBerry ran for president in 1964. The two Black candidates were
smeared in the press when FBI operatives sent out anonymous letters detailing
minor legal transgressions from their pasts. To create friction between Black
and white members, the FBI would write nasty anonymous letters containing slurs
like this one supposedly written by white members to their Black vice
presidential candidate in 1968 “ You and the rest of your fellow party monkeys
hook up with the Black Panthers where you'd feel at home.”
Disruption operations were
often designed to split alliances between the SWP and its antiwar and racial
justice allies in movements. During a campaign to defend framed Blacks in North
Carolina, the FBI sent coalition leaders phony information claiming that the
SWP was stealing funds collected for the defense campaign. An FBI memorandum in
1966 explained the need to create disruption within the ranks of the SWP and to
hamper the party's antiwar actions and objectives. When leading members Fred
Halstead and Barry Sheppard traveled to visit troops in Vietnam, the FBI
planted incendiary reports of their visit in newspapers read by GIs to
encourage violence against them by troops. After the explosive protests outside
the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968, an anonymous letter was
mailed to sixty-eight antiwar and New Left groups attacking the SWP and YSA for
their cowardice in not fighting the police and warned the socialists to get out
of the antiwar movement. The letter did cause a stir inside the party and made
some members anxious about their involvement with New Left forces.
Assassinations:
On December
3rd 1969 the FBI launched its deadliest assault on the BPP yet. An
informant who was a bodyguard of Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton provided
officials with a detailed floor plan of his home. Police raided his place and
murdered Hampton in his bed and in the hail of ninety-eight rounds of bullets,
Mark Clark of the Peoria Panthers was also killed. Police rounded up and beat
Hampton's fiancé who was eight months' pregnant along with several others
sleeping there. These victims were all charged with aggressive assault or
attempted murder and held on $100,000 bail-though there were no signs of any
retaliatory shots fired.
Police
ransacked Panther offices from San Francisco to Indianapolis, destroyed
typewriters, stole files, and ruined bulk foods stored for ghetto children's
programs. Arrests and frame-ups of dozens of members cost the organization
$200,000 in bail money alone. Some remain behind bars to this day, while others
have spent decades harassed by law enforcement officials. It's worth noting
that despite the charges of violence against the Panthers years of surveillance
and infiltration never turned up hard evidence of criminal activities.
COINTELPRO Tactics included:
(1)
Eavesdropping:
This involved not only electronic surveillance but also putting tails on people
and breaking into offices and homes as well as tampering with mail. The FBI's
intention was not simply to gather intelligence but making their presence known
in various ways to create paranoia among activists.
(2)
Bogus mail:
FBI agents would fabricate letters, ostensibly written by movement activists who
spread lies and disinformation. The Bureau sent many fake letters to American
Indian Movement (AIM) and Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders and activists that
were designed to sow confusion and division in the ranks. The Huey Newton and
Eldridge Cleaver wings of the BPP for example, were split after the FBI sent a
number of manufactured letters from disgruntled party members to Cleaver. After
he was exiled to Algeria, he would spend much of his time criticizing Huey
Newton's leadership.
(3)
Black propaganda: The distribution of fabricated articles and leaflets that
misrepresented the politics and objectives of an organization or leader in
order to discredit the group or individual and to pit people and organizations
against each other.
(4)
Disinformation:
The FBI often released false or misleading information to the press to
discredit groups or individuals and to foster tension.
(5) Harassment arrests: The police or FBI often arrested leaders and activists on trumped up
charges in order to tie up activists in legal and court proceedings to drain
their financial resources and heighten their sense of fear and paranoia.
(6) Infiltrators or agent provocateurs: The infiltration of organizations by police agents
served two purposes. One was to gather intelligence on the group. Provocateurs
were used to try and encourage individuals to engage in illegal activity that
could then be attributed to the group as a whole to disrupt the internal
functioning of organizations and to assist in spreading of disinformation
inside and outside the group.
(7) Assassinations: There is ample evidence that FBI and related agencies played a direct
role in the assassination of a number of key radical leaders.
(8) Bad-jacketing:
This refers to the practice of creating suspicion-through the spread of rumors
and the manufacture of evidence on bonafide organizational members. Usually it
was persons’ in key positions that were FBI/police informers. This technique was used often against the American
Indian Movement. Talented AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash for example, who was
murdered on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in February 1976, was first
subject to a successful whispering campaign initiated against her by FBI
informant Doug Durham. Doug Durham, who had joined the AIM chapter in Des
Moines, Iowa. Durham's role in AIM also seems to have been to encourage AIM
members to engage in rash and inflammatory acts according to- author Peter
Mathiessen. Durham, for example released several unauthorized memos-
disseminated on organizational letterhead, indicating that AIM was preparing to
launch a campaign of 'systematic violence.
(9) Fabrication of evidence: FBI agents, police and prosecutors routinely fabricated
evidence in order to obtain convictions in criminal cases against activists. A
number of AIM and BPP activists including BPP leader Geronimo Pratt and AIM
leader Leonard Peltier, who have been in prison for three decades for a crime
he did not commit were convicted on such trumped-up evidence.
Cointelpro Today:
Since the attacks of Sept.
11 2001, the New York Police Department has become one of the country’s most
aggressive domestic intelligence agencies.
The NYPD has been gathering vast domestic intelligence with help from
the CIA. The department’s intelligence unit currently dispatches undercover
officers to keep tabs on ethnic neighborhoods, sometimes in areas far outside
their jurisdiction. After the 9/11/2001
attacks a month-long investigation initiated by The Associated Press has
revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic
communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced
by the federal government and it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA
in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic
spying.
The CIA inspector general
opened its own investigation after a series of articles written by the
Associated Press revealed how the NYPD, working in close collaboration with the
CIA set up spying operations that put Muslim communities under scrutiny.
Plainclothes officers known as "rakers" eavesdropped on businesses
and Muslims not suspected of any wrongdoing were put in intelligence databases.
In its investigation, the CIA's inspector general faulted the agency for
sending an officer to New York with little oversight after the September 11
2001 terrorist attacks and then leaving him there too long according to officials
who have read or been briefed on the inquiry. After the investigation, the CIA
inspector general cleared the agency of any wrongdoing.
The CIA officer, Lawrence
Sanchez how was the architect of the spying programs that helped make the NYPD
one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies was cited by
the inspector general for operating without sufficient supervision. Sanchez is
a CIA veteran who according to his biography spent 15 years overseas in the
former Soviet Union, South Asia and the Middle East. Sanchez was sent to New
York to help with information sharing following the 9/11 attacks. While on the
CIA payroll from 2002 to 2004 he also helped create and direct police
intelligence programs.
He then formally joined
the NYPD while on a leave of absence from the CIA. The loosely defined
assignment strained relations with the FBI and two consecutive CIA station
chiefs in New York who complained that Sanchez's presence undermined their
authority. U.S. officials have acknowledged that the rules were murky but they
attributed that to the desperate push for better intelligence after the
attacks. Sanchez left the NYPD in 2010 and then last July the CIA sent one of
its most senior clandestine operatives to work out of the NYPD. While other internal investigation found
problems with the oversight of Sanchez's assignment, officials said the rules
of the current arrangement were more than clearly defined. The naturally the programs
have also drawn criticism from Muslims as well as New York and Washington
lawmakers.
Muslim activists even
urged Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to resign and invoked the legacy of the
1960s FBI program COINTELPRO, which spied on political and activist groups.
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, the spokesperson for the Islamic Leadership Council of
New York stated "We the people find ourselves facing the specter of a 21st
century COINTELPRO once again in the name of safety and security"
Even now the confusion
remains; Police Commissioner Kelly said the new officer was working at the NYPD
to help share foreign intelligence. Federal officials have said he was there on
a management sabbatical and was not sharing intelligence. Kelly and the federal
government also are at odds explaining the legal basis for a relationship between
a local police department and the CIA which is not allowed to spy domestically.
This fall, Kelly told the city council that the collaboration was authorized
under a presidential order. But under those rules, the assignment would have
had to have been approved by the CIA's top lawyer. The AP reported last week
there was no such approval. A CIA spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood said Sanchez
was sent to New York at the direction of then CIA Director George Tenet who had
the authority to move his officers around the world to make sure intelligence
was being shared. That arrangement did not require the lawyer's approval she
stated: "Context matters here, the CIA stepped up cooperation with law
enforcement on counterterrorism after 9/11. It's hard to imagine that anyone is
suggesting this was inappropriate or unexpected."
The current officer, whose
name remains classified, operates under a more formal arrangement that is
specified in writing, states that he works directly for the NYPD. Nevertheless,
some U.S. lawmakers have expressed concerns about the assignment. Even the
federal government's most senior intelligence official James Clapper, Director
of National Intelligence has said the arrangement looks bad and will be
addressed. The CIA officer is working as a special assistant to David Cohen the
NYPD's top intelligence officer. It’s unclear exactly when the CIA officer will
leave the police department and what his next job will be. A former station
chief in Pakistan and Jordan, he is one of the CIA's most experienced spies.
His assignment in New York was expected to last a year. The NYPD police commissioner Ray Kelly has
defended his department and it’s Demographics Unit which monitors conversations
in cafes and wrote reports on Muslim businesses. Kelly has said that his
officers only follow leads, however internal police documents obtained by the
AP show that even the most generic lead was used to justify surveillance of
entire neighborhoods.
Officials involved in the
effort also told the AP that the Demographics Unit actually avoided locations
where criminal investigations were under way for fear of disrupting them. Relations
between the NYPD and the Muslim community were further strained when police
acknowledged that it showed nearly 1,500 officers a training video featuring
Kelly. The video portrayed Muslims wanting to infiltrate and dominate the
United States.
References:
COINTELPRO: What the
(Deleted) Was It?
SUPPLEMENTARY DETAILED
STAFF REPORTS ON INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS
COINTELPRO
(Counterintelligence Program)
The lessons of COINTELPRO
Post-9/11, NYPD targets
ethnic communities, partners with CIA
CIA helped NYPD launch
spying network post-9/11 without getting proper legal approval
CIA report: No issue with
spy agency's partnership with N.Y. police
NYPD Confirms CIA Employee
Partnership
CIA To Pull Officer from
NYPD after Internal Probe
