Beginning in the fall of 1971, some
curious events took place in Detroit, Michigan. In late October, lists of
supporters, contributors, and subscribers to the party newspaper were stolen
from the campaign headquarters of the Michigan Socialist Workers party. A few
months later, the home of a Socialist Workers party organizer was robbed.
Valuables were ignored, but membership lists and internal party bulletins were
stolen. The burglaries remain unsolved.
If we ask who might be interested in
obtaining the stolen material, a plausible hypothesis suggests itself. The
natural hypothesis gains support from the fact that persons whose names
appeared on the stolen lists were then contacted and harassed by FBI agents,
and a personal letter of resignation from the party, apparently stolen from
headquarters, was transmitted by the FBI to the Civil Service Commission.
Information that has since been obtained about FBI activities, including
burglaries over many years, lends further plausibility to the conclusion that
the FBI was engaged in one of its multifarious endeavors to undermine and
disrupt activities that fall beyond the narrow bounds of the established
political consensus.
The Detroit events recall another
incident which, with its aftermath, became the major news story of 1974. But it
would be misleading to compare the Detroit burglaries to the Watergate caper.
If, indeed the FBI was responsible, as seems most likely, then the Detroit
burglaries are a far more serious matter. If the conclusion is correct, then in
Detroit it was the political police of the national government which, in their
official function, were engaged in disrupting the “sanctity of the democratic
process,” not merely a gang of bunglers working “outside the system.” (1)
The ousting of Richard Nixon for his
misdeeds was described in the nation’s press as “a stunning vindication of our
constitutional system.” (2) The Detroit example, and others far
more serious to which I return, suggest a rather different reaction. There is a
fundamental distinction between Watergate and Detroit. In
the case of the events surrounding Watergate, the victims were men of power who
are expected to share in the ruling of society and the formation of ideology.
In Detroit the victims were outsiders, fair game for political repression of a
sort that is quite normal. Thus it is true, in a sense, that the punishment of
Nixon and his cohorts was a vindication of our system, as this system actually
operates in practice. The Nixon gang had broken the rules, directing against the political
center a minor variant of the techniques of repression that are commonly
applied against radical dissent. If the basic work of
repression continues after Nixon, without appreciable comment or concern, then
this too will show that the system is functioning, quite in accord with ample
historical precedent.
Even assuming FBI involvement, the
Detroit incident is nevertheless minor in comparison with other facts exposed
during the 1970s. From December 1973, the government was compelled through
several civil suits to release documentary evidence concerning its various
campaigns to undermine and disrupt legal activities directed to social change
or simply protest against state policy, through the decade of the 1960s. In
comparison with these revelations, the whole Watergate affair was a tea party.
The documents and depositions made public during this period, and revelations
by disaffected government agents, lay bare a systematic and extensive program
of terror, disruption, intimidation, and instigation of violence, initiated
under the most liberal Democratic administrations and carried further under
Nixon. The Department of Justice, in its apologetic and fragmentary review,
asserts that the “counterintelligence program” (Cointelpro) operations “were
apparently not reported to any of the Attorneys General in office during the
periods in which they were implemented,” apart from “certain aspects of the
Bureau’s efforts to penetrate and disrupt the Communist Party USA and White
Hate Groups.” (3) Assuming
this assertion to be true, we may still observe that government officials who
had even a passing familiarity with FBI practices in the past had a definite
responsibility to determine how the Bureau was acting under their authority.
A review of these programs demonstrates
the relative insignificance of the charges raised against Nixon and his
associates, specifically, the charges presented in the Congressional Articles
of Impeachment. (4) Further insight into the
state of American society can be derived by the following simple exercise:
compare the attention focused on the Watergate episodes by the mass media,
including the liberal press and journals of opinion, with the reaction to the exposures,
during exactly the same period, of the FBI programs. This exercise will
demonstrate that until the dust had settled over Watergate, there was virtually
no mention of the government programs of violence and disruption or comment
concerning them, and even after the Watergate affair was successfully
concluded, there has been only occasional discussion. The New Republic,
which, during the Watergate period, could fairly be considered the semiofficial
organ of American liberalism, was unconcerned by these exposures, though hardly
an issue passed without a denunciation of Nixon for his crimes, trivial by
comparison. With a few honorable exceptions (specifically, the Nation),
the same was true more generally. The Watergate affair thus reveals quite
clearly the subservience of the media to power and official ideology. The
example is a particularly telling one, given that the media are so commonly
hailed for their courage and independence in exposing the petty criminality of
the Watergate affair -- petty, that is, in comparison to the real criminal acts
of the state exposed during the same period, but not by the media.
The lesson of Watergate is simple.
American liberalism and the corporate media will defend themselves against
attack. But their spirited acts of self-defense are not to be construed as a
commitment to civil liberties or democratic principle, despite noble and
self-serving rhetoric. Quite the contrary. They demonstrate a commitment to the
principle that power must not be threatened or injured. The narrow “elites”
that control the economy, political life, and the system of conventional
doctrine must be immune to the means of harassment that are restricted, in the
normal course of events, to those who raise a serious challenge to ruling
ideology or state policy or established privilege. An “enemies list” that
includes major corporate leaders, media figures, and government intellectuals
is an obscenity that is seen as shaking the foundations of the republic. The
involvement of the national political police in the assassination of Black
Panther leaders, however, barely deserves comment in the national press,
including the liberal press and journals, with rare exceptions.
The Cointelpro operations of the 1960s
were modeled on the successful programs of earlier years undertaken to disrupt
the American Communist Party. Though details are unknown, these programs were
no secret, and were generally regarded as legitimate. The programs directed
against the Communist party continued through the 1960s, with such interesting
innovations as Operation Hoodwink from 1966 through mid-1968, designed to
incite organized crime against the Communist party through documents fabricated
by the FBI, evidently in the hope that criminal elements would carry on the
work of repression and disruption in their own manner, by means that may be
left to the imagination. (5)
From the evidence now available, it
appears that the first FBI disruption program (apart from the CP) was launched
in August 1960 against groups advocating independence for Puerto Rico. In
October 1961, the “SWP Disruption Program” was put into operation against the
Socialist Workers Party. The grounds offered, in a secret FBI memorandum, were
the following: the party had been “openly espousing its line on a local and national
basis through running candidates for public office and strongly directing
and/or supporting such causes as Castro’s Cuba and integration problems...in
the South.” The SWP Disruption Program, put into operation during the Kennedy
administration, reveals very clearly the FBI’s understanding of its function:
to block legal political activity that departs from orthodoxy, to disrupt
opposition to state policy, to undermine the civil rights movement.
These basic commitments were pursued in
subsequent years. For example, the Phoenix office of the FBI noted in a
memorandum of October 1, 1968, that Professor Morris Starsky of Arizona State
University, “by his actions, has continued to spotlight himself as a target for
counterintelligence action.” These “actions” consisted of the following crimes
against the state: “He and his wife were both named as presidential electors by
and for the Socialist Workers Party when the SWP in August, 1968, gained a
place on the ballot in Arizona. In addition they have signed themselves as
treasurer and secretary respectively of the Arizona SWP.” Nothing further is
alleged, though an earlier memorandum (May 31, 1968) identifies Starsky as one
of those who have provided “inspiration and leadership” for “New left
organizations and activities in the Phoenix metropolitan areas,” so that he is
one of “the most logical targets for potential counterintelligence action.” The
memorandum suggests that “reliable and cooperative contacts in the mass media”
should be helpful in this particular program of “Disruption of the New Left.”
The documents in the Starsky case also indicate that prior to the targeting of
Starsky on October 1, the FBI had somehow influenced the board of regents that
controls the university to “find cause to separate Professor STARSKY from the
public payroll” on trumped-up charges. (6)
Similarly, the comprehensive program to
“expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various New
Left organizations, their leadership and adherents,” secretly put into
operation in May 1968, was motivated by the fact that New Left activists “urge
revolution,” are responsible for unspecified “violence and disruption,” “call
for the defeat of the United States in Vietnam,” and “continually and falsely
allege police brutality and do not hesitate to utilize unlawful acts to further
their so-called cause.” They have even “on many occasions viciously and
scurrilously attacked the Director and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our
investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses,” where,
naturally, the state’s political police should be free to operate with
impunity. The latter offense was particularly grave since, as is now known, FBI
provocateurs were engaged in extensive efforts throughout the country to
instigate campus violence, disrupt student groups, eliminate radical faculty,
and the like, and FBI agents were, for example, engaged in such actions as
stealing documents from campus groups and burglarizing the offices of
professors supporting them. (7)
The commitment of the FBI to undermine
the civil rights movement, despite an elaborate pretense to the contrary (and
even some actions as government policy vacillated on the issue), will come as
no surprise to people with first-hand experience in the South in the early
1960s. As late as summer 1965, FBI observers refused to act within their legal
authority to protect civil rights demonstrators who were being savagely beaten
by police and thrown into stockades (some, who tried to find sanctuary on federal
property, were thrown from the steps of the federal building in Jackson,
Mississippi, by federal marshals). These efforts continued in later years, as,
for example, when the FBI, under Cointelpro, succeeded in driving a black
minister from the Jackson Human Rights Project in early 1969, causing him to
leave the South altogether, by sending him a “spurious, threatening letter” and
encouraging school and church officials to file complaints against him on the
basis of charges which (according to his ACLU lawyer) were fabricated by the
Bureau and “derogatory” information provided by the Bureau. (8)
There is no dearth of other examples to
illustrate what the Pike Committee Report calls “FBI racism.” The campaign to
discredit Dr. Martin Luther King is a case that is now well-known. In October
1963 the FBI sought permission, which was granted by Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, to install wiretaps on King’s home telephone and at two offices of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King headed. In November 1964
the FBI sent King the following unsigned note:
King, there is only one thing left for
you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it. (This
exact number has been selected for a specific reason.) It has definite practical
significance. You are done. There is but one way out for you.
Enclosed was a tape obtained from
electronic surveillance. The note was received 34 days before Dr. King was to
receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and was, quite naturally, taken to be an effort
to drive him to suicide. The Bureau also harassed the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic party in 1964 and attempted to destory two civil rights groups in
St. Louis by sending forged letters accusing members of marital infidelity, in
1969 and 1970. The Bureau took credit for helping to break up the marriage of a
white activist, who was forced to curtail her civil rights work, by these
means. An FBI memo reads: “While the letter sent by the St. Louis division was
probably not the sole cause of this separation, it certainly contributed very
strongly.” (9) The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
commented editorially (November 19, 1975) that these disclosures make it “hard
to imagine that there was any tactic too sordid for this federal agency to use,”
referring to the efforts “to undermine the effectiveness of ACTION and the
Black Liberators in St. Louis,” and the general program of which they were a
part.
In still another example under
Cointelpro, revealed in the Pike Committee Report:
the FBI authorized interfering with a
Mellon Foundation’s decision of whether to give Unity Corporation, a black
organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a $150,000 grant. The FBI contacted a
confidential source within the Mellon Foundation, the grant was denied, and the
Unity Corporation subsequently went bankrupt.
Chalk up another victory for law and
order. We return directly to examples of “FBI racism” of a considerably more
serious nature.
Predictably, the most serious of the
FBI disruption programs were those directed against “Black Nationalists.” These
programs, also initiated under liberal Democratic administrations, had as their
purpose “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the
activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their
leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their
propensity for violence and civil disorder.” Agents were instructed “to inspire
action in instances where circumstances warrant.” Specifically, they were to
undertake actions to discredit these groups both within “the responsible Negro
community” and to “Negro radicals,” also “to the white community, both the
responsible community and to `liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for
militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes...”
Several model actions were proposed to
agents, who were instructed “to take an enthusiastic and imaginative approach
to this new counterintelligence endeavor,” including an action apparently
directed against the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1967,
in which local police, alerted by the FBI, arrested leaders “on every possible
charge until they could no longer make bail” so that they “spent most of the
summer in jail and no violence traceable to [blank] took place.” In this case
too, agents were directed to use “established local news media contacts” and
other “sources available to the Seat of Government” to “disrupt or neutralize”
these organizations and to “ridicule and discredit” them. In the light of these
documents, one cannot fail to recall the elaborate subsequent campaign, in this
case abetted by several liberal intellectuals and democratic socialists, to
ridicule and discredit individuals who attempted to raise funds for the Black
Panthers during the period when they were being subjected to extensive police
and judicial attack.
Among the most remarkable of the
revelations concerning the FBI campaigns against black groups are those
relating to the attempts to exploit gang warfare and incite murderous attacks,
which have now come to light in several cities. A Cointelpro memo mailed
November 25, 1968, informs recipient offices that:
a serious struggle is taking place
between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the US organization. The struggle has
reached such proportions that it is taking on the aura of gang warfare with
attendant threats of murder and reprisals.
In order to fully capitalize upon BPP
and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating further
dissension in the ranks of the BPP, recipient offices are instructed to submit
imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling
the BPP.
A series of cartoons were produced in
an effort to incite violence between the Black Panther party and US (a second
black group), for example, one showing Panther leader David Hilliard hanging
dead with a rope around his neck from a tree, with two US members below, one
saying to the other: “He really was a paper tiger,” and other comparably
imaginative creations. The San Diego office reported to the director that:
in view of the recent killing of BPP
member SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it
will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US. This cartoon, or
series of cartoons, will be similar in nature to those formerly approved by the
Bureau and will be forwarded to the Bureau for evaluation and approval
immediately upon their completion.
Under the heading “TANGIBLE RESULTS”
the memo continues as follows:
Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of
unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although
no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to
this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is
directly attributable to this program.
Under the same heading, the memo
reports that “the BPP Breakfast Program appears to be floundering in San Diego
due to lack of public support and unfavorable publicity concerning it.” The “unfavorable
publicity” included anonymous telephone calls placed by the Bureau to Auxiliary
Bishop [blank] “protesting the BPP Breakfast Program and Father [blank]
participation therein.” Additional calls were proposed, since earlier ones had
proven so effective in blocking this program to distribute free breakfasts to
the poor.
The Chicago office was even more
imaginative. On January 30, 1969, it received permission, as requested, to mail
the following letter to Jeff Fort, leader of the Blackstone Rangers:
Brother Jeff:
I’ve spent some time with some Panther
friends on the west side lately and I know what’s been going on. The brothers
that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed
to be a hit out for you. I’m not a Panther, or a Ranger, just black. From what
I see these Panthers are out for themselves not black people. I think you ought
to know what their up to. I know what I’d do if I was you. You might hear from
me again.
A black brother you don’t know.
“Their thing” was an attempt by the
Panthers to politicize the Blackstone Rangers, described by the Chicago office
of the FBI as a group “to whom violent type activity, shooting, and the like,
are second nature.” (10)
The purpose of the letter was explicit.
It was sent “in anticipation that its receipt by Fort will intensify the degree
of animosity existing between these two Black extremist organizations.” It is
obvious how a “violence-prone” gang might be expected to respond to the
information that the Black Panther Party had “a hit out” for its leader.
Releasing these documents, the Senate
Select Committee noted that the Chicago office proposal of December 16, 1968,
came shortly after an alleged shooting incident between Rangers and Panthers,
though one Ranger reportedly told police that the incident was in fact a meeting
“called because the Panthers wanted to ask the Rangers to stop street killings.” (11)
The FBI effort to incite gang war and
murder in Chicago failed. It seems that the Panthers and Rangers understood
very well just what was happening. The Chicago office of the FBI then turned to
some new ideas, to which we return directly.
The Pike Committee Report cites other
examples illustrating FBI programs concerning black groups. In another case, an
anonymous letter was sent to the Black Panther party accusing a member of being
a police informant. In yet another, a threatening letter was sent to Huey
Newton “purporting to be from a follower of Eldridge Cleaver.” These were both
under Cointelpro. The intent can easily be imagined.
During these years, FBI provocateurs repeatedly
urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruption of meetings and
demonstrations on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and
so on. Meanwhile, government agencies financed, helped organize, and supplied
arms to right-wing terrorist groups that carried out fire-bombings, burglaries,
and shootings, all with the knowledge of the government agencies responsible (12) -- in most cases the FBI, although one right-wing
terrorist in Chicago claims that his group was financed and directed in part by
the CIA. (13) One FBI provocateur resigned when
he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person
who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle, where
it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson,
terrorism, and bombings of university and civic buildings, and where the FBI
arranged a robbery, entrapping a young black man who was paid $75 for the job
and killed in a police ambush. (14) In another
case, an undercover operative who had formed and headed a pro-Communist Chinese
organization “at the direction of the bureau” reports that at the Miami
Republican convention he incited “people to turn over one of the buses and then
told them that if they really wanted to blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the
gas tank and light it” (they were unable to overturn the vehicle). The same
ex-operative contends that Cointelpro-type operations, allegedly suspended in
April 1971, were in fact continuing as late as mid-1974, when he left the
Bureau’s employ. (15)
Many details are now available
concerning the extensive campaign of terror and disruption waged by the
government during these years, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups
organized and financed by the national government but primarily through the
much more effective means of infiltration and provocation. In particular, much
of the violence on campus can be attributed to government provocateurs. To cite
a few examples, the Alabama branch of the ACLU argued in court that in May 1970
an FBI agent “committed arson and other violence that police used as a reason
for declaring that university students were unlawfully assembled” (16) -- 150 students were arrested. The court ruled
that the agent’s role was irrelevant unless the defense could establish that he
was instructed to commit the violent acts, but this was impossible, according
to defense counsel, since the FBI and police thwarted his efforts to locate the
agent who had admitted the acts to him. William Frapolly, who surfaced as a
government informer in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, an active member of
student and off-campus peace groups in Chicago, “during an antiwar rally at his
college,...grabbed the microphone from the college president and wrestled him
off the stage” and “worked out a scheme for wrecking the toilets in the college
dorms...as an act of antiwar protest.” (17)
Perhaps the most shocking story
concerns the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police
directed by the state’s attorney office on December 4, 1969, in a predawn raid
on a Chicago apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders of the Black
Panther party, was killed in bed, perhaps drugged. Depositions in a civil suit
in Chicago reveal that the chief of Panther security and Hampton’s personal
bodyguard, William O’Neal, was an FBI infiltrator. O’Neal gave his FBI “contacting
agent,” Roy Mitchell, a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which Mitchell
turned over to the state’s attorney’s office shortly before the attack, along
with “information” -- of dubious veracity -- that there were two illegal
shotguns in the apartment. For his services, O’Neal was paid over $10,000 from
January 1969 through July 1970, according to Mitchell’s affidavit.
The availability of the floor plan
presumably explains why “all the police gunfire went to the inside corners of
the apartment, rather than toward the entrances,” and undermines still further
the pretense by the police that the police barrage was caused by confusion in
unfamiliar surroundings that led them to believe, falsely, that they were being
fired upon by the Panthers inside. (18) Agent
Mitchell was named by the Chicago Tribune as head of the Chicago
Cointelpro directed against the Black Panthers and other black groups. Whether
or not this is true, there is now substantial evidence of direct FBI
involvement in this Gestapo-style political assassination.
O’Neal, incidentally, continued to
report to Mitchell after the raid. He was taking part in meetings with the
Hampton family and discussions between lawyers and clients, one of many such
examples of violation of the lawyer-client relation. To cite another, which did
receive considerable publicity, the chief security officer of the American
Indian Movement, also a paid FBI informer, “was the only person, other than
defendants and lawyers, with regular access to the room in which defense
strategy was planned.” So valuable were his services during this period that
his cash payment from the Bureau was raised from $900 to $1,100 a month. “The
Government, in a sworn affidavit at the trial, had appeared to contend that it
had no informer in the defense ranks.” The informer, who came to believe that
AIM was, in his words, a “legal, social organization that wasn’t doing anything
wrong,” reports also that he helped lead an armed takeover of a state office
building in Iowa, among other tasks performed for the FBI. (19)
There has as yet been no systematic
investigation of the FBI campaign against the Black Panther party in Chicago,
as part of its nationwide program of political repression. But on the basis of
the scattered information that has come to light, it is possible to offer some
speculations as to how FBI plotting may have progressed. The efforts of late
1968 and early 1969 to instigate gang warfare -- specifically, to incite the
Rangers to murder leaders of the Black Panthers -- ended in failure. In
subsequent months, it seems that the Panthers began to achieve some success in
moving the Blackstone Rangers from criminal activities to political concerns.
Members of the Rangers were living in the apartment where Hampton and Clark
were assassinated. Hampton was proving an effective leader, particularly
worrisome to the political police because of his express distate for violence
and inflammatory rhetoric and his emphasis on constructive political action. As
long as the Rangers were just a criminal gang terrorizing the black ghetto,
they were of little concern to the FBI -- except, of course, insofar as their
tendency towards violence could be exploited for the FBI’s campaign of
political repression. But an alliance with the Panthers, particularly under the
leadership of someone like Fred Hampton, was another matter. It is possible
that such an analysis led the Chicago office of the FBI, operating within the
framework of Cointelpro, to set in motion the events of December 4, 1969. This,
of course, remains speculation. To determine what truth there may be in this
reconstruction it would be necessary to conduct a serious investigation of FBI
attempts to foment murder, violence and gang warfare, and of the FBI
involvement in the police raid on the Panther apartment. Neither the House nor
the Senate Select Committee attempted to draw the evidence together or to
pursue it, so far as publicly available evidence indicates. As for the press
and the journals of opinion, they have demonstrated conclusively that they were
much more concerned with tape erasures, tax fraud, illegal donations, and other
such monumental and unprecedented crimes, which were seen as virtually bringing
fascism to the United States. When survivors of the police raid sued the FBI
and the Chicago police, the government settled out of court rather than provide
a forum for investigation.
A top secret Special Report for
the president in June 1970 (20) gives some
insight into the motivation for the actions undertaken by the government to
destroy the Black Panther party. The report describes the party as “the most
active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.” Its “hard-core
members” were estimated at about 800, but “a recent poll indicates that
approximately 25 per cent of the black population has a great respect for the
BPP, incuding 43 per cent of blacks under 21 years of age.” On the basis of
such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive agencies of the
state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a
substantial social or political force. We may add that in this case, government
repression proved quite successful.
The same Special Report develops
the broader motivation for the FBI operations. The intelligence analysis
explains that “the movement of rebellious youth known as the ‘New Left,’
involving and influencing a substantial number of college students, is having a
serious impact on contemporary society with a potential for serious domestic
strife.” The New Left has “revolutionary aims” and an “identification with
Marxism-Leninism.” It has attempted “to infiltrate and radicalize labor,” and
after failing “to subvert and control the mass media” has established “a large
network of underground publications which serve the dual purpose of an internal
communication network and an external propaganda organ.” Its leaders have “openly
stated their sympathy with the international communist revolutionary movements
in South Vietnam and Cuba; and have directed others into activities which
support these movements.” “Although New Left groups have been responsible for
widespread damage to ROTC facilities, for the halting of some weapons-related
research, and for the increasing dissent within the military services, the
major threat to the internal security of the United States is that directed
against the civilian sector of our society.”
A review of events in San Diego,
submitted to the Church Committee in June 1975 under the auspices of the
American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California and released
to the press at that time, (21) gives further
insight into the activities of the FBI during the period we are considering.
The report, much of which is based on “pubic admissions of the officers and
agents involved, including sworn testimony at various criminal trials and
statements given to new reporters and investigators,” describes how the FBI
managed to convert a disbanded right-wing paramilitary organization (Minutemen)
into the Secret Army Organization (SAO), placing an FBI informant, Howard
Godfrey, in a leadership position. Godfrey was paid $250 a month plus expenses.
“Between 1967 and 1972, Godfrey, using F.B.I. resources, furnished firearms,
explosives, other equipment and funds to the Minutemen and SAO,” supplying at
least 75% of the SAO’s operating expenses. (22)
An SAO cell directed by Godfrey “engaged
in repeated acts of violence and terrorism against the left,” all with the
knowledge of his FBI superiors. Among these acts were destruction of newspaper
offices and book stores, firebombing of cars, distribution of leaflets giving
the address of the collective where anti-war activist Peter Bohmer lived “for
any of our readers who may care to look up this Red Scum, and say hello,” etc.
On January 6, 1972, Godfrey and another SAO member fired two shots into the
collective’s house, using a gun that Godfrey had stolen. One of the bullets hit
Paula Tharp, a resident of the house and New Left activist. The following day,
Godfrey informed his FBI supervisor, Steve Christiansen, and gave him the gun
and a jacket worn by the gunman. Christiansen hid the gun in his apartment for
six months and destroyed the jacket, concealing the information from the San
Diego police, under FBI orders. The story of this and other incidents became
public in June 1972 when the SAO was finally broken up by police after the SAO
bombed a movie theater where two police officers were present. The FBI
succeeded in averting prosecution of Godfrey or any FBI agents, including
Christiansen, who was permitted to resign and sent off to Utah, where he
reports that “the F.B.I. is taking good care of us.” The FBI then continued
with other illegal intelligence and terror programs directed against Bohmer and
associates, including several assassination plots. Not one FBI agent or
informer has been prosecuted.
As an interesting sidelight, the report
states that “in the spring of 1971, according to a [San Diego State] college
employee, F.B.I. agents furnished information about Bohmer to college
administrative officials and looked through and copied or made notes on his
confidential college personnel file.” Bohmer was then an instructor at the
college. The college subsequently brought charges against Bohmer, using “information
which could only have been furnished by law enforcement agencies.” (23) A hearing was held, but before it made its
findings, the college president fired Bohmer. The hearing committee ruled in
Bohmer’s favor and he was reinstated. The college then arranged a second
investigation under the auspices of the American Association of University
Professors. Bohmer was cleared again, but the chancellor of the California
state college system, Glenn Dumke, declared that he would not permit Bohmer to
be rehired and ordered a third hearing, which also cleared Bohmer of any wrongdoing.
Dumke rejected the hearing findings and Bohmer was dismissed. This was only one
of many political firings during these years. (24) It is now commonly alleged that during
what is sometimes called “the time of troubles” the universities were terrorized
by left-wing totalitarians. (25)
A careful review of the facts would
reveal a rather different story. The record of FBI-organized violence and
terror in San Diego was submitted to the Church Committee in June 1975. On
January 11, 1976, the San Diego Union reported some of this information,
leading to denials by FBI Director Clarence Kelley, who, however, “acknowledged
today that a leader of an alleged secret paramilitary group set up in
California to battle antiwar protesters was a paid F.B.I. informer.” (26) On February 2, the San Diego City Council
forwarded a resolution to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Church
Committee), “urging its members to come to San Diego to conduct hearings.” (27) The city council also ordered an
independent local investigation. One city councilman said that he had informed
Senate investigators of efforts to restore peace to the black community at the
time when the FBI was attempting to incite gang warfare there. “We were making
progress in our efforts to cool things down, at a time when the F.B.I. was
trying to increase the strife and bloodshed,” he said. The national chairman of
the US organization, now a professor at San Diego State, said that US and the
Panthers had been negotiating to avoid bloodshed: “Then the F.B.I. stepped in
and the shooting started.” As we see, the FBI effort to provoke gang warfare
among black groups was only a part of a more general program of violence and
terror, targeting antiwar activists as well.
In summary, during the decade of the
1960s and for a period of unknown duration since (perhaps still continuing),
the FBI extended its earlier clandestine operations against the Communist
party, committing its resources to undermining the Puerto Rico independence
movement, the Socialist Workers party, the civil rights movement, black
nationalist movements, the Ku Klux Klan, segments of the peace movement, the
student movement, and the “New Left” in general. The overall allocation of FBI
resources during this period is of course unknown. One relevant bit of evidence
is provided by the “Media files,” stolen from the Media, Pennsylvania, office
of the FBI in March 1971 by a group calling itself “the Citizen’s Commission to
Investigate the FBI,” and widely distributed through left and peace movement
channels. According to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1
percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were “manuals,
routine forms, and similar procedural matter”; 40 percent were devoted to
political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing
groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups.
Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and “leaving the
military without government permission.” The remainder concerned bank
robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft. (28) Whether
these figures are typical or not we cannot know, in the case of a secret
terrorist organization such as the FBI. It is clear, however, that the
commitment of the FBI to undermine and destroy popular movements that departed
from political orthodoxy was extensive, and was apparently proportional to the
strength and promise of such movements -- as one would expect in the case of
the secret police organization of any state, though it is doubtful that there
is anything comparable to this record among the Western industrial democracies.
The effectiveness of the state
disruption programs is not easy to evaluate. Surely it was not slight. Black
leaders estimate the significance of the programs as substantial. Dr. James
Turner of Cornell University, president of the African Heritage Studies
Association, assesses these programs as having “serious long-term consequences
for black Americans,” in that they “had created in blacks a sense of depression
and hopelessness.” (29) He states that “the
F.B.I. set out to break the momentum develped in black communities in the late
fifties and early sixties”; “we needed to put together organizational
mechanisms to deliver services,” but instead, “our ability to influence things
that happen to us internally and externally was killed.” He concludes that “the
lack of confidence and paranoia stimulated among black people by these actions”
were just beginning to fade. Conceivably, the long-term impact may be salutary:
“We realize that we can’t depend on symbolism and on inspired leadership and we
are beginning to build solidly based organizations.” “Symbolism and inspired
leadership” are easy targets for the repressive institutions of the state, its propaganda
agencies, and cooperative intellectuals. Solidly based organizations may be
able to withstand such attacks. The same lesson, of course, must be learned
outside the black community.
We note further that the criminal
activities of the FBI were initiated under the liberal Democratic
administrations and carried further under Nixon. These programs were
(partially) exposed during the Watergate period, and though incomparably more
serious than anything charged against Nixon, they were virtually ignored during
this period by the liberal national press and journals of opinion. I have
discovered personally -- and others may verify for themselves -- that much of
the most significant information is unknown to generally well-informed
journalists and other intellectuals, and that the scale of the FBI programs is
rarely appreciated even today, though by now enough information is readily
available for those who choose to know.
We note finally that “the Justice
Department has decided not to prosecute anyone in connection with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s 15-year campaign to disrupt the activities of
suspected subversive organizations.” (30) J.
Stanley Pottinger, head of the Civil Rights Division, reported to the attorney
general that he had found “no basis for criminal charges against any particular
individuals involving particular incidents.” The director of the FBI also made
clear that he saw nothing particularly serious in the revelations of the past
several years. There is as yet no public record or evidence of any systematic
investigation of these practices. As already noted, the liberal press paid
little heed to the record that was being exposed during the Watergate period
and even since has generally ignored the more serious cases and failed to present
anything remotely resembling an accurate picture of the full record and what it
implies. In short, the system continues to work.
The criminal programs of the FBI during
the 1960s are simply an extension of past practices. As the Pike Committee
Report observes, the Socialist Workers Party “has been subjected to 34 years of
intensive investigation” (and, we may add, years of harassment and disruption
as well), without any evidence whatsoever of any illegal activity. (31) According to William C. Sullivan, Hoover’s
assistant for many years:
Such a very great man as Franklin D.
Roosevelt saw nothing wrong in asking the FBI to investigate those opposing his
lend-lease policy -- a purely political request. He also had us look into the
activities of others who opposed our entrance into World War II, just as later
Administrations had the FBI look into those opposing the conflict in Vietnam.
It was a political request also when he [Roosevelt] instructed us to put a
telephone tap, a microphone, and a physical surveillance on an internationally
known leader in his Administration. It was done. The results he wanted were
secured and given to him. Certain records of this kind ... were not then or
later put into the regular FBI filing system. Rather, they were deliberately kept
out of it. (32)
Not long after World War II ended,
President Truman put into operation the repressive measures which laid the
basis for what is misleadingly called “McCarthyism.” The Mundt-Nixon bill
calling for the registration of the Communist party was reported out of Nixon’s
House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948. Senate liberals objected,
and after a Truman veto they proposed as a substitute “the ultimate weapon of
repression: concentration camps to intern potential troublemakers on the
occasion of some loosely defined future ‘Internal Security Emergency’,” (33) including,
as one case, “insurrection within the United States in aid of a foreign enemy.”
(34) This substitute was advocated by Benton,
Douglas, Graham, Kefauver, Kilgore, Lehman, and Humphrey, then a freshman
senator. Humphrey later voted against the bill, though he did not retreat from
his concentration camp proposal. In fact, he was concerned that the conference
committee had brought back “a weaker bill, not a bill to strike stronger blows
at the Communist menace, but weaker blows.” The problem with the new bill was
that those interned in the detention centers would have “the right of habeas
corpus so they can be released and go on to do their dirty business.” (35) In later years as well, Senate liberals were
responsible for some of the most repressive legislation. During the same
period, the ideological institutions of American society -- the mass media,
cinema, and the universities and schools -- were successfully purified as
radicals were largely eliminated from the sensitive professions and often
harassed or dismissed elsewhere as well. It was only under the pressure of the
student movement in the late 1960s that the universities were compelled to
become slightly less orthodox and occasionally to make more than marginal
concessions to freedom of thought and inquiry that moved beyond the ideological
consensus.
It is now commonly argued that during
the late 1960s the universities were virtually taken over by the left, while
the mass media took on an adversary position with respect to state authority --
some say irresponsibly, while others laud the press for its honesty and
independence. This is gross nonsense. The orthodoxy of the universities was
barely challenged. Overwhelmingly, university departments, particularly those
concerned with domestic policy and international affairs, remained under the
control of people committed to the reigning state capitalist ideology, and
throughout the Vietnam war the subversion of the universities in the service of
state policy persisted with only minor interference. As for the media, I have
already pointed out that the Watergate affair -- allegedly their finest hour --
merely demonstrates their continued subservience to the ruling powers. The same
is generally true with regard to the war in Vietnam. Even the liberal press
generally continued, to the end, to describe the war as a conflict between North
and South Vietnam, hewing close to the official propaganda line. Media doves
joined most liberal intellectuals in protesting that the United States was
defending South Vietnam in an exercise of misplaced benevolence. The war was “a
mistake,” a case of good motives transmuted (mysteriously) into bad policy,
with no one to blame. The fact that the United States was engaged in direct
aggression in South Vietnam, and that its murderous attack against the rural
society of South Vietnam then spilled over to neighboring regions, has been
consistently suppressed by the media and journals of opinion, again with a few
honorable exceptions, though I am unaware of even a single instance in which
the media referred to U. S. aggression in South Vietnam, clearly the
case from 1962, when the U. S. air force began the bombardment of rural South
Vietnam, and surely not in question from early 1965. The war in Laos and
Cambodia was kept “secret” over long periods through the self-censorship of the
press, which then hypocritically blamed Nixon for deception when the time came
to punish him for his departure from the established rules of the game.
Kissinger’s efforts to evade the provisions of the “peace treaty” were also
effectively kept from public attention, in a remarkable display of
submissiveness. I have given elaborate documentation elsewhere, and will not discuss
this matter further here. (36)
I have spoken of this system as a post
World War II phenomenon, but that is misleading. Its roots go far deeper.
Recall that J. Edgar Hoover rose to national prominence when he was appointed
chief of the General Intelligence (anti-radical) division of the Justice
Department in August 1919, just before the “Palmer raids” of January 2, 1920,
when more than 4,000 alleged “radicals” were rounded up in thirty-three cities
in twenty-three states (over 200 aliens were subsequently deported), while the Washington
Post editorialized that “there is no time to waste on hairsplitting over
infringement of liberty” in the face of the Bolshevik menace, and lauded the
House of Representatives for its expulsion of socialist congressman Victor
Berger on grounds that it could not have given a “finer or more impressive
demonstration of Americanism”; the New York Times meanwhile described
the expulsion of socialist assemblymen as “an American vote altogether, a
patriotic and conservative vote” which “an immense majority of the Americn
people will approve and sanction,” whatever the benighted electorate may
believe. (37)
One may trace the pattern back much
further, to the Alien and Sedition Acts by which “the Federalists sought to
suppress political opposition and to stamp out lingering sympathy for the
principles of the French Revolution, (38) or the
judicial murder of four anarchists for “having advocated doctrines” which
allegedly lay behind the explosion of a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square
after a striker had been killed by police in May 1886. (39)
The Cointelpro documents and the related disclosures are noteworthy, and
in accord with historical precedent, in that no specific illegal acts were
charged against those targeted by the FBI, though a vague “propensity for
violence” and unspecified violent acts are alleged. Similarly, the “seditious
utterances” of the Haymarket anarchists sufficed, in the eyes of the Chicago
police, to attribute “moral responsibility” for the bombing and to justify
their prosecution and hanging. (40) And Attorney General Palmer justified
his actions “to clean up the country almost unaided by any virile legislation”
on grounds of the failure of Congress “to stamp out these seditious societies
in their open defiance of law by various forms of propaganda”:
Upon these two basic certainties, first
that the “Reds” were criminal aliens, and secondly that the American Government
must prevent crime, it was decided that there could be no nice distinctions
drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual
violations of our national laws.} Palmer’s “information showed that communism
in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens, who were direct
allies of Trotzky.” Thus “the Government is now sweeping the nation clean of
such alien filth,” with the overwhelming support of the press, until they
perceived that their own interests were threatened. (41)
Elsewhere he described the prisoners as
follows:
Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many
of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime; from their lopsided faces,
sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable
criminal type.
Palmer was a liberal and progressive.
His purpose was “to tear out the radical seeds that have entangled American
ideas in their poisonous theories.” (42) His
belief that the state has the authority to prevent these seeds from germinating
is within the general framework of American liberalism. The mass media, the
schools, and the universities defend ideological orthodoxy in their own,
generally successful, ways. When a threat to reigning dogma is perceived, the
state is entitled to act.
After World War I, labor militancy
menaced established privilege. Hoover labored to portray the 1919 steel strike
as a “Red conspiracy.” A subsequent miner’s strike was described by President
Wilson as “one of the gravest steps ever proposed in this country,” “a grave
moral and legal wrong,” while the press warned that the miners, “red-soaked in
the doctrines of Bolshevism,” were “starting a general revolution in America.” (43) The Red Scare, as Levin shows, “was promoted, in
large part, by major business groups which feared their power was threatened by
a leftward trend in the labor movement”; and they had “reason to rejoice” at
its substantial success, namely, “to weaken and conservatize the labor
movement, to dismantle radical parties, and to intimidate liberals.” It “was an
attempt -- largely successful -- to reaffirm the legitimacy of the power elites
of capitalism and to further weaken workers’ class consciousness.” The Red
Scare was strongly backed by the press and the American elites until they came
to see that their own interests would be harmed as the right-wing frenzy got
out of hand--in particular, the anti-immigrant hysteria, which threatened the
best reserve of cheap labor.
The Red Scare also served to buttress
an interventionist foreign policy. Foster Rhea Dulles observed that “governmental
agencies made most of these fears and kept up a barrage of anti-Bolshevik
propaganda throughout 1919 which was at least partially inspired by the need to
justify the policy of intervention in both Archangel and Siberia.” (44)
After World War II, the story was
reenacted. While intellectual ideologists depicted American expansionism as “defense
of freedom” (with an occasional, but so understandable excess of zeal), transmuting
the brutal Russian state into a global aggressor under an elaborate mythology
that even its creators have been compelled to disown, (45)
the state moved to ensure obedience and submissiveness to the evolving
imperial system and the domestic permanent war economy. As already noted,
American liberals had their hand in some of the worst abuses. The general
motivation was the traditional one: “there could be no nice distinctions drawn
between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of
our national laws” (Palmer).
The basic liberal doctrine was laid out
clearly by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his opinion upholding the
Smith Act on grounds “that it was no violation of free speech to convict
Communists for conspiring to teach or advocate the forcible overthrow of the
government, even if no clear and present danger could be proved.” For if the
clear and present danger test were applied, Jackson argued, “it means that
Communist plotting is protected during its period of incubation; its
preliminary stages of organization and preparation are immune from the law, the
Government can move only after imminent action is manifest, when it would, of
course, be too late.” Thus there must be “some legal formula that will secure an
existing order against revolutionary radicalism.... There is no constitutional
right to `gang up’ on the Government.” Opposition tendencies, however
minuscule, must be nipped in the bud prior to “imminent action.” As for the
Communist party, “ordinary conspiracy principles” suffice to charge any
individual associated with it “with responsibility for and participation in all
that makes up the Party’s program” and “even an individual,” acting alone and
apart from any “conspiracy,” “cannot claim that the Constitution protects him
in advocating or teaching overthrow of government by force or violence.” (46)
In conformity with these doctrines, the
ideological institutions must be kept free of contamination. Even a single
tenured Marxist professor of economics in a country as complex and diverse as
the United States was regarded as constituting a potential threat. As in the
case of the Red Scare of 1920, it was only when the hysteria that had been
whipped up began to endanger major institutions and individuals near the center
of power that the economic and political leadership and their intellectual
spokesmen took effective measures to terminate the repression -- or more
accurately, to restrict it to the proper victims.
Given the historical context, it is
entirely natural that the beginnings of protest and organization in the early
1960s set the apparatus of repression into operation once again, in the manner
described above and elsewhere. (47) Nor is it
surprising that American liberalism looked the other way, until the repression
struck home under Nixon; and even then, it is important to emphasize once
again, indignation was largely restricted to Nixon’s crimes, insignificant in
comparison to the revelations of the same period. Matters are no different when
the black anarchist Martin Sostre--designated as a “prisoner of conscience” by
Amnesty International--was mercilessly persecuted by the state for many years,
or when black students were murdered at Orangeburg and Jackson State, and on
and on.
Some commentators have found it “puzzling”
that the FBI should devote such energies to such actions as hounding a
scoutmaster in Orange, New Jersey, whose wife is a socialist, or disrupting
small socialist parties, while “crime rates in American cities escalated and
organized crime expanded its interests” and “the real espionage dangers from
the Soviet K.G.B.” were “apparently ignored.” (48) Placing
the events in their historical and doctrinal context, the puzzle is easily
resolved. The real threat to the “existing order” was not organized crime or
the KGB, but “revolutionary radicalism” or even protest by popular groups that
have escaped the control of the political leadership and intellectual
ideologists. That this threat can quickly become real indeed was made evident
in the later 1960s, when American aggression in Vietnam was significantly
hampered (49) and its ideological props swept
away (in significant circles, though not in the major ideological
institutions).
For the most part, however, the threat
of intellectual independence and uncontrolled political and social organization
has been well contained (the major postwar success of the “containment policy”).
Alone among the parliamentary democracies, the United States has had no
mass-based socialist party, however mild and reformist, no socialist voice in
the media, and virtually no departure from interventionist militarized state
capitalist ideology within the schools and universities, at least until the
pressure of student activism impelled a slight departure from orthodoxy. All of
this is testimony to the effectiveness of the system of controls that has been
in force for many years, the activities of the FBI being only the spearhead for
far more extensive, substantial, and effective -- if more low-keyed -- measures
enforced throughout American society.
From its inception, the FBI has
operated on the liberal doctrine that “preliminary stages of organization and
preparation” must be frustrated, well before there is any clear and present
danger of “revolutionary radicalism,” occasionally progressing beyond the
intended bounds of this doctrine. The people of the United States pay dearly
for domestic privilege and the securing of imperial domains. The vast waste of
social wealth, miserable urban ghettos, meaningless work within authoritarian
capitalist institutions, the threat (or reality) of loss of even the
opportunity to rent oneself to the owners of capital, standards of health and
social welfare that should be intolerable in a society with vast productive
resources -- all of this must be endured and even welcomed as “the price of
freedom” if the existing order is to stand without challenge. The
intelligentsia have generally played their natural role, promulgating the
required doctrines with enthusiasm and energy and diverting or diluting any
serious departure from the conventional system of beliefs, with an occasional
show of dismay when privileged groups themselves are threatened. As for the
state instruments of repression, one can expect little change in coming years,
at least until the rise of mass-based popular organizations devoted to social
change and to an end of oppression and injustice.
This
chapter is a revised version of the introduction to Nelson
Blackstock, COINTELPRO (New York: Vintage, 1976), with some
further material added in 1980, and reworked again in 1999.
1 In August 1986, U.S. District Court
Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in favor of the Socialist Workers Party in a civil
suit against the Attorney General, declaring “the FBI’s disruption activities,
surreptitious entires and use of informants” to be “violations of the constitutional
rights of the SWP.” Among numerous FBI crimes, Judge Griesa’s decision
identified at least 208 “surreptitions entries,” though the specific Detroit
case was not listed. For the text of the decision, see A Fight for Political Rights (Political Rights Defense Fund, n.d.).
2 Henry
Steele Commager, “The Constitution Is Alive and Well,” New York Times,
August 11, 1974. Commager,
who has been forceful in defense of civil liberties and opposition to the
Indochina war, states that prior to Nixon, “no President has ever attempted to
subvert” the Constitution or “challenged the basic assumptions of our
constitutional system itself.” But “the system worked” and the challenge was
defeated.
3 Press release of the Department of
Justice, released by Attorney General William B. Saxbe and FBI Director
Clarence M. Kelley, November 18, 1974.
5 John M.
Crewdson, “Levi Reveals more Harassment by F.B.I.,” New York Times, May
24, 1975. Also AP, Boston Globe, May 24, 1975.
6 Memorandum of July 1, 1968. This is not
the only example of FBI efforts to interfere in academic affairs. Attorney
General Edward Levi testified before the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence that “he had once been a recipient of a counterintelligence letter
aimed at discrediting a professor at the university” (he was then president of
the University). An anonymous letter was sent by the FBI to the board of
trustees and the press concerning the antiwar activities of Richard Flacks (“who
was later beaten by an unidentified assailant for his political views,” a few
months after “members of a radical right-wing group called the Legion of
Justice had attacked students”). N.Y. Times, December 19, 1975. The letter was sent in the hope
that “it may discourage Flacks or even result in his ultimate removal from the
University of Chicago” (FBI memorandum, Aug. 2, 1968), but without discernible
results, the Bureau reported. In another case, “the FBI approved furnishing
information to a responsible Harvard University official that a student who was
employed by the University was involved in Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) activities. Shortly thereafter, the student lost his job” (Report of the
House Select Committee on Intelligence, citing a Cointelpro memorandum, Village Voice supplement,
February 16, 1976; henceforth, Pike
Committee Report). The
Pike Committee report was published in England: CIA:
The Pike Report (Spokesman, 1977). To
my knowledge, no American publisher (and no major publisher anywhere) found
this very revealing material sufficiently significant to merit publication.
One such case
involved me personally. In the fall of 1969, the Boston office of the FBI
forwarded to the Director a proposal to block the reappointment of two instructors
in a course that I was teaching (along with Louis Kampf) by furnishing some
unidentified person within MIT with “numerous public source data” concerning
their backgrounds, “which identifies their connections and associations with
SDS and the BDRG (Boston Draft Resistance Group)” and with a “defunct radical
paper” and a “radical film-making group.” “It is believed that if MIT is in
possession of all the public source material concerning [blank] and [blank]
they would not reappoint them to their respective positions with the Humanities
Department at MIT. This counterintelligence action would also frustrate [blank]
who has been attempting to build up the Humanities Department of MIT with
radical-type instructors such as [blank] and [blank].” The person to be “frustrated,”
judging by the number of letters blanked out, is presumably Louis Kampf. The
FBI Director authorized the action, ordering that “you are to impress upon
[blank; presumably the contact within MIT] the necessity for keeping the Bureau’s
interest in this matter in the strictest confidence.” A subsequent memorandum
from the Boston office states that “On 8/18/69 [blank], Mass. Institute of
Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., an established source of the Boston Office,
advised that as a result of the public source material that was furnished
confidentially to him relating to [blank] and NICHOLAS EGLESON he was able to
have their re-appointments to the staff of MIT canceled. [Blank] and EGLESON’s
reappointment as an instructor was considered to be automatic. [Blank] was very
grateful for the public source data received and indicated that all aspects of
this operation would be kept confidential. Boston will remain alert for any
other potential counter intelligence actions in regard to captioned group.” FBI
memoranda of 6/20/69, 7/7/69, 8/21/69, provided to Nicholas Egleson under
legislation requiring that Cointelpro targets be given documents concerning
them. The second person prefers to remain unidentified.
The established
source of the Boston FBI office within MIT, however, was not telling the truth
in this case, as I am impelled to inform the Boston office, fulfilling my
patriotic duty as a servant of the state. Neither of the two instructors
requested reappointment. There was, to my knowledge, no inquiry within MIT to
determine who is the established source of the Boston FBI Office within the
university, after this information was made public.
In the absence of
systematic inquiry, one can only guess as to the scope and character of
FBI-university connections devoted to subversion of academic freedom.
7 On the latter, see Vin McLellan, “FBI Heists Names of 1970 Student Strikers,” Boston
Phoenix, March 5, 1974, based on the report of former security
officers at Brandeis University.
9 Nicholas
M. Horrock, N.Y. Times, November 19, 20, 1975; Robert Adams and Martha
Shirk, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 19, 1975.
10 With the successful destruction of the
Panthers and their political work, the Rangers kept to full-time criminal
activity. Under Fort’s leadership, the gang (later called El Rukns) became “the
first super gang, or corporate-type gang” in the country, according to
University of Chicago professor Irving Spergel, an expert on street gangs.
Twenty-one members were defendants in a 1991 criminal trial. Fort, who still
heads the gang, is in federal prison on two concurrent sentences (75 and 80
years). Rev. George Clements, a Catholic priest working in the area, describes
Fort as a “dynamic” leader who “could have been Mayor of Chicago or
something...if you could have turned [him] around in the early days.” Don
Terry, “In Chicago Courtroom, Nation’s First Super Gang Fights for Life, New
York Times, May 19, 1991; no mention is made of the earlier U.S. government
connection, or the possibility that Fort might well have been “turned around”
had the state authorities permitted political activism to proceed.
11 Harry
Kelly, “FBI spurred gang fight in Chicago, Senate says,”Chicago Tribune,
November 20, 1975. The
head of the FBI Chicago field office at the time that the letter was sent
testified in federal court that its purpose was entirely nonviolent, and that
it would not have been approved “if it had referred to violence of any kind” (Rob Warden, Chicago Daily News, February 11, 1976).
12 For a review of some of these actions,
see Dave Dellinger, More Power than We Know
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); Gary T. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected
Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the
Informant,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 80, no. 2 (September
1974, pp. 402-42).
13 Mike
Royko, Chicago Daily News; Boston Globe, February 1, 1975. Royko’s source refused to take his information
to the investigating agencies, on the grounds that “these local
prosecutors...were involved in the same kind of thing” and will “wind up
looking at themselves in a mirror.”
14 For information on these and other FBI
actions in Seattle, see Dellinger, op. cit., and Frank J. Donner, “Hoover’s Legacy,” Nation, June 1, 1974.
15 John M.
Crewdson, “Ex-Operative Says He Worked for F.B.I. To Disrupt Political
Activities up to ‘74,” New York Times, February 24, 1975.
18 John
Kifner, “F.B.I. Gave Chicago Police Plan of Slain Panther’s Apartment,” New
York Times, May 25, 1974. Although
the act of FBI involvement in the Hampton assassination, along with other
details of this major state crime, was not widely publicized outside of
Chicago, nevertheless there were a few reports, such as this one. There can be
no excuse for the general silence on this matter, which alone overshadows the
entire Watergate Affair by a substantial margin.
19 John
Kifner, “Security Aide for Indians Says He Was F.B.I. Informer,” New York
Times, March 13, 1975.
20 Special
Report of Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc), Chairman J. Edgar
Hoover, along with
the directors of the CIA, DIA, and NSA, prepared for the President, June 25,
1970, marked “Top Secret.” A censored version was later released. Quotes below
are from Book 7, Part 1: Summary of Internal Security Threat.
21 Everett
R. Holles, “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded `Army To terrorize Antiwar Protesters’,”
N.Y. Times, June 27, 1975. Information
and quotes given below are from the 18-page single-space report submitted to
the Senate Select Committee on June 27, 1975, unless otherwise indicated. See
also Steven V. Roberts, “F.B.I. Informer Is Linked to
Right-Wing Violence, N.Y. Times, June 24, 1974.
22 Godfrey “has testified in a California
court that the bureau gave him $10,000 to $20,000 worth of weapons and
explosives for use by the [SAO] in addition to his $250-a-month salary as an
informant.” John M. Crewdson, “Kelley Discounts F.B.I.’s
Link to a Terrorist Group,” N.Y. Times, January 12, 1976.
23 The report also notes that FBI agents
and Cambridge, Mass. police broke into the apartment of George Katsiaficas, “ransacked
it and stole his personal diaries and other papers and effects,” according to
court testimony at a criminal trial by the Cambridge police officer involved.
Katsiaficas and Bohmer were friends in Cambridge and were involved in political
activities there. Both went to San Diego. Both were targeted by the SAO and
were subsequently plaintiffs in a civil suit supported by the ACLU in San Diego.
24 I have discussed another clear-cut
example in Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1971, p. 72). See also my Towards
a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), chapter 1, note 23. There are
many others. To my knowledge, there has been no systematic investigation of
this matter. Still more significant is the extraordinary conformism of
scholarship; for some discussion, see chapters 1, 2 of Towards a New Cold
War, particularly 103f.
26 “F.B.I.
Chief Tells of Coast Informant,” N.Y. Times, January 14, 1976, p. 57. Reporting Kelley’s denials, here and on
January 12 (see note 20), the Times also cited some of the charges,
attributing them to the discoveries of Senate committee investigators, though
the information cited was contained in the June 1975 ACLU report and was in
fact reported by the Times at the time (see note 19).
27 Everett
R. Holles, “San Diego Seeking Inquiry into F.B.I.,” N.Y. Times, February
8, 1976. Holles also refers to
“evidence assembled by the Senate committee’s investigators,” citing
information in the June ACLU report that appeared in the Times in June,
1975. The Times reports in January and February 1976 suggest that a
Senate inquiry is in progress but give no evidence that this is so. The
February 2 resolution of the San Diego City Council indicates that there has
been no serious investigation. To the best of my knowledge, there has been
none.
28 For analysis and texts of the Media
documents, see Paul Cowan, Nick Egleson, and Nat
Hentoff, State Secrets (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). Comparable
figures are given by Marx (op. cit.). He notes that “among the 34 cases
[of infiltration] for which some information is available, 11 involved white
campus groups, 11, predominantly white peace groups and/or economic groups; 10,
black and Chicano groups; and only two, right-wing groups.” Furthermore, “in
two-thirds of the 34 cases considered here, the specious activists appear to have
gone beyond passive information gathering to active provocation.” It had been
speculated that Cointelpro was terminated (officially at least) after the
program was exposed by the Media burglary. This is confirmed in a briefing with
the Assistant Director of the FBI in charge of the Intelligence Division. See
Pike Committee Report.
29 C.
Gerald Fraser, “F.B.I. Action in 1961 Called Still Harmful to Hopes of Blacks,”
New York Times, April 6, 1974. See also Jesse Jackson and Alvin Poussaint. “The Danger Behind FBI Obstruction of Black Movements,” Boston
Globe, April 2, 1974.
30 “Charges Over F.B.I.'s Tactics on
Subversive Suspects Barred,” Washington Star-News; New York Times,
January 4, 1975.
31 The committee report notes that the FBI
Manual of Instructions allows preliminary investigation of “extremist” groups,
but requires that these be terminated in 90 days if there is no indication of
criminal violations.
32 Letter to the annual Chief Justice Earl
Warren Conference on Advocacy, June 7-8, 1974, cited from the final report, Privacy in a Free Society,
by Nat Hentoff, “The Privacy War Games,” Village Voice, December 9,
1974.
33 Frank
Wilkinson, The Era of Libertarian Repression - 1948 to 1973: from
Congressman to President, with Substantial Support from the Liberal
Establishment, University of Akron, 1974; reprinted from the University of
Akron Law Review.
36 See my For Reasons of State (New
York: Pantheon, 1973, and earlier books. Also Towards a New Cold War,
chapters 3,4. See also (with E.S. Herman) Counterrevolutionary Violence:
Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (New York: Warner Modular, 1973),
suppressed by order of the parent conglomerate (Warner Brothers) but available
in French (Bains de Sang, Paris: Seghers/Laf#$%, 1974) and other
European languages. On the corporate suppression of this monograph, see the
prefatory note to Chomsky and Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights
(Boston: South End Press, 1979). This suppression, which led finally to the
decision of the parent conglomerate to put the publisher out of business,
received no public mention to my knowledge. It should be noted that there was a
fair amount of honest and important work by American foreign correspondents in
the field, and occasional instances of accurate and serious review and analysis
at the editorial level as well. For an outstanding example, see the review of
the war in the special supplement of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch under the direction of Richard Dudman, April 30, 1975. For
an extensive review of Indochina war coverage from 1950 through the mid-1980s,
see Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon,
1988).
37 On the post World War I “Red Scare” see
Murray B. Levin, Political Hysteria in America: the
Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1972). Other
sources have cited figures as high as 10,000 arrested during the Palmer Raids
and 700 aliens departed. See Max Lowenthal, The
Federal Bureau of Investigation (William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1950).
39 Ibid. A fifth committed suicide before the
sentence of death could be executed. Three others were sentenced to hanging as
well, but were not executed. No proof was offered that any of the eight had
been involved in the bomb-throwing.
40 See the excerpt from Michael J.
Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, Chicago, 1889, in Davis’s collection.
Schaack was captain of the East Chicago Avenue Police Station and “was widely
credited with having uncovered the anarchist conspiracy” (Davis).
44 Foster
Rhea Dulles, The Road to Teheran (Princeton: Princeton U. press, 1945), cited by Levin, op. cit.
45 In his Bancroft Prize-winning study of
the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis points out that “historians, revisionist and
nonrevisionist, now generally agree on the limited nature of Stalin’s
objectives,” citing a number of examples. Gaddis, The
United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 355, note 2. A more accurate
statement would be that after the revisionist challenge to orthodoxy, these
elements of the revisionist critique were quietly absorbed by mainstream
scholarship, abandoning earlier pretense, while the “revisionists” were
regularly denounced, often on the basis of gross misrepresentation and absurd
argument, of which Gaddis provides some examples, with his criticism of the “economic
determinism” of those who noted that foreign policy was, naturally enough,
heavily influenced by the interests of forces in the domestic society that had
the power to make this influence felt. See Towards a New Cold War,
chapter 7, note 15, for other examples. For discussion of this phenomenon, see
Christopher Lasch’s introduction to Gar Alperovitz, Cold
War Essays (Anchor, 1970).
47 See, among others, N. Blackstock, ed., COINTELPRO
(New York: Vintage, 1976), for which this chapter was originally the
introduction; Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods
of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Knopf, 1980); Robert
J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, (Cambridge:
Schenkman, 1978); Morton H. Halperin et. al., The Lawless State (New
York: Penguin, 1976); Christy Macy and Susan Kaplan, eds., Documents
(New York: Penguin, 1980); Ward Churchill and John Vander Wall, Agents of
Repression (Boston: South End, 1988); Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”
(New York: Free Press, 1989); Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers
(Boston: South End, 1990); Donner, Protectors of Privilege (U. of
California, 1990).
48 Nicholas M. Horrock, “The F.B.I.’s
Appetite for Very Small Potatoes,” New York Times, March 23, 1975.
49 On the significance of the threat, both
actual and potential, as perceived at high levels of policy planning, see my
review of some of the evidence contained in the “Pentagon Papers” in For
Reasons of State, Chapter 1. For discussion of the impact on the American
expeditionary force, see David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, Doubleday,
1975).
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