Cointelpro (FBI)
In 1956 the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a formal counter intelligence program against the Communist Party of the United States. Eleven more programs opened in the next decade, targeting an array of groups and causes: Groups Seeking Independence for Puerto Rico, White Hate Groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan), Black Nationalist Hate Groups (such as the Black Panther Party), New Left, Cointelpro-Espionage, Cuban Matters, Hoodwink (to cause disputes between the American Communist Party and the Mafia), Mexican Communist Party Matters, Socialist Workers Party, Special Operations (Nationalities Intelligence), and Yugoslav (Violence-Prone Yugoslav Emigrés to the United States). The program aimed at the New Left was compromised in 1972 by anti–Vietnam War activists who broke into an FBI office and mailed a number of "liberated" files to Congress and the media. That security breach led the FBI to terminate all twelve programs.
J. Edgar Hoover and other FBI officials created COINTELPRO unilaterally. Goals were nearly identical in every case: "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize." Specific Black Hate operations, for example, ranged from petty harassments to a carefully orchestrated police raid that ended in the murder of the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The FBI informant who helped with that raid's logistics received a cash reward. Martin Luther King Jr. was another COIN-TELPRO target in this category, and that fact has helped keep alive several of the sensational if largely baseless conspiracy theories surrounding his assassination. Regardless, the counter intelligence programs were not what one would normally expect to see in a democracy.
Bibliography
Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wail. The COINTELPRO Papers. Boston: South End Press, 1991.
O'Reilly, Kenneth. "Racial Matters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972. New York: Free Press, 1979.
U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. COINTELPRO Files: The Counterintelligence Program of the FBI. 30 reels. Microfilm ed. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1978.
—Kenneth O'Reilly
