COINTELPRO

The Story

On March 8, 1971, someone broke into the FBI's small resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and walked out with files. Copies soon began arriving at newspapers, and the press published them. Some of the documents carried a caption that meant nothing to anyone outside the bureau: COINTELPRO.

An NBC reporter, Carl Stern, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what the word meant. According to the Senate's later investigation, the FBI formally ended every COINTELPRO on April 27, 1971, "for security reasons," weeks after the break-in. In the fall of 1973, the Justice Department released some of the documents Stern had requested. COINTELPRO turned out to be short for counterintelligence program, and the bureau had been running such programs against Americans since 1956.

"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is." (anonymous letter the FBI mailed to Martin Luther King Jr., as quoted by the Senate)

The full picture came out in April 1976, in the final report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Its staff studied more than 20,000 pages of bureau documents and took depositions from agents. The committee wrote that the program began partly out of frustration with Supreme Court rulings that limited the government's power to act openly against dissident groups, and that it "ended in 1971 with the threat of public exposure."

There were five formal programs, each with its own target: the Communist Party USA (1956-71), the Socialist Workers Party (1961-69), "White Hate Groups" such as Klan organizations (1964-71), "Black Nationalist-Hate Groups" (1967-71) and the "New Left" (1968-71). The committee warned that the labels were loose. The nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King's organization, was filed as a Black Nationalist "Hate Group." The directive that started that program in August 1967 told field offices their purpose was "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the groups, their leaders and their supporters.

The bureau approved 2,370 separate actions. According to the committee, the techniques ranged from mailing articles to group members, some of them written or planted by the bureau, to sending anonymous letters to a member's spouse alleging infidelity. Agents used informants to stir up dissent at meetings and contacted employers to get targets fired. They also used what was later called the "snitch jacket," falsely labeling a group member as a police informant, and encouraged violence between rival groups. The committee called some of the actions "abhorrent in a free society" and said others were "more silly than repellent."

The bureau's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. showed how personal the operation could get. Between January 1964 and November 1965, the committee found, the FBI installed at least 15 hidden microphones in hotel and motel rooms where King stayed. In November 1964, weeks before King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, an FBI agent flew to Miami and mailed a package from a post office near the airport. It held a tape recording from the bugs and an unsigned letter. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," the letter said. "You have just 34 days in which to do" it.

Andrew Young, King's assistant at the time and later a congressman, testified that King "felt somebody was trying to get him to commit suicide." The FBI's hostility outlasted King himself. In 1970, two years after his assassination, Hoover told reporters that King was the "last one in the world who should ever have received" the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Black Panther Party was among the most heavily targeted groups. The committee quoted an FBI document about a police raid on a Chicago apartment that killed the local Panther chairman, Fred Hampton, and another Panther. Before the raid, it said, "a detailed inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor plan of the apartment were furnished to local authorities," information it said was "not available from any other source."

Ending the formal program did not end every practice. The termination order still allowed counterintelligence proposals "in exceptional circumstances." The committee identified at least three COINTELPRO-type operations after April 1971 and warned that similar activity could continue under the label of investigation. In its overall judgment, the bureau had conducted "a sophisticated vigilante operation" aimed at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.

COINTELPRO is not a theory. It is a confirmed government program, documented in the FBI's own files and in the Senate's official report.