The Burglary (61 page)
Authors: Betty Medsger
Some of the plots would have been considered beyond the bounds of humane conduct if carried out by any agency or individual, but they were regarded as even worseânearly beyond beliefâwhen it was discovered such operations had been executed by the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency, and that it did so under the leadership of a director who repeatedly spoke of the need for strict moral behavior. And who would fire an agent for simply having sweaty palms.
The Media break-in changed the whole dynamic, says historian
Athan Theoharis. Then, when
COINTELPRO was revealed, “that finally exceeded what the public would support.”
Widely exposed during the
Church Committee hearings in 1975, these secret FBI operationsâCOINTELPRO and othersâutilized the tools of espionage. Tools usually reserved for clandestine use against foreign enemies were employed under Hoover against a wide swath of Americans in efforts
to stop dissent. The methods used by the FBI inflicted pain, anxiety, and humiliationâforms of torture.
The operations were, in the words of respected surveillance scholar
Frank Donner, “
an embryonic version of officially instigated terrorism.”
Wrote Donner, “
The bureau constituted itself the secret instrument of a tribal system of justice directed against people it had itself defined as enemies and outcasts.” These investigations were “
highly personalized â¦Â unfettered by professionalism or, for that matter, the norms of legality and accountability.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
That's how Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, deputy director of the FBI from 1965 to 1970, assessed COINTELPRO operations in his 1996 book
Hoover's FBI: The Inside Story
. DeLoach defended Hoover until his own death in March 2013. When the nature of these operations was first revealed in the mid-1970s, probably few, if any, people thought such methods of intelligence gathering or law enforcement were a good idea.
The operations were carried out as part of Hoover's overall vision of his duty not only to enforce the lawâwhich could not be done with these programs because most of the FBI actions involved were illegal and, therefore, could not be presented in courtâbut also to maintain the status quo and quash new ideas by harassing people into silence and passivity.
Files were maintained and actions taken against people in nearly all movements: the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement (then referred to as homosexual groups), and the environmental movement. The
Ku Klux Klan was added to the list after President Johnson ordered the director in 1964 to investigate a series of brutal murders against civil rights workers in Mississippi.
Sanford Ungar, to this day still the only writer to whom an FBI director (Clarence Kelley) granted wide access to FBI officials and internal information about their operations, in 1975 described some COINTELPRO methods and the impact of these secret illegal operations on the FBI's official responsibilities:
As the director saw that he was on to an issue that was stirring considerable emotion in the country, he embarked on a veritable crusade.â¦Once an organization or activist â¦Â had been put into the category of a threat, they were pursued with a vengeance almost unknown in FBI annals. Their phones were tapped, their every movement watched in the hope
that some basis could be found for charging them with a local or federal crime.
The manpower assigned to such domestic intelligence was sometimes doubled, tripled or quadrupledâeven at the expense of the bureau's responsibilities for genuine counterintelligence efforts against foreign espionageâas the FBI pursued the director's new public enemy number one.
The COINTELPRO operations were started by Hoover in 1956.
Frustrated by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that made it no longer possible to prosecute people for radical political speech or Communist Party membership, the director circumvented the court's decisions and created COINTELPRO as his secret means of punishing, through harassment and dirty tricks, people who could no longer be punished under the law.
He had always secretly used such unscrupulous methods, it would be learned in the 1980s, but the 1970s investigations provided the first evidence of what he created, starting in 1956âCOINTELPRO operations directed against specific types of individuals and organizations. He opened successive COINTELPRO programs, including ones that were directed against the Socialist Workers Party, the
Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, the New Left, the American Indian Movement, and black and white hate groups. In all, there were twelve COINTELPRO umbrella programs. Within each category, the director used wide discretion as to which individuals and organizations would be targeted. As with the infiltration of black groups in Philadelphia that was documented in the Media files, organizations that professed violence, such as the Black Panther Party, and organizations that professed nonviolence, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, all qualified as targets of COINTELPRO programs.
The
Church Committee investigation presented the country, for the first time, with a substantial body of information about how the secret FBI and other intelligence agencies operated. Memorably, the hearings revealed the CIA's attempted assassinations of Cuban president Fidel Castro and its attempts to overthrow democratically elected leaders. But in the end, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the chief counsel to the Church Committee, concluded, after examining all the evidence gathered by the committee, that the worst abuses were committed by the FBI. “
The FBI abuses were much more dangerous. They undermined American democracy, violated the law and subverted the Constitution.” The pervasiveness of domestic intelligence, he
noted, was “reflected in the sheer volume of Americans spied upon. The FBI opened more than 500,000 domestic intelligence files, each typically including several individuals' names.”
On the first day of the Church Committee's hearings, Schwarz stated the key role of the Media files in exposing abuses by the bureau:
“Let me observe that whatever effort there was to turn off COINTELPRO occurred only after it had been exposed â¦Â by the theft of documents from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI, and exposed in the press, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit [a reference to Carl Stern's suit].”
The evidence collected by the Church Committee revealed the very wide scope and impact of the secret power and influence Hoover assumed belonged to him. No part of the government or American life was outside his reach.
He used his secret power to destroy individuals and to manipulate and destroy organizations, including a major American university. He secretly punished people he regarded as wrong-thinkingâcivil rights leaders, senior members of Congress who questioned war policy, and also average people who wrote letters to a member of Congress or dared to express their dissent by appearing at an antiwar demonstration. In Hoover's world, the evidence showed, any American was fair game.
In addition to the evidence gathered and testimony given before the Church Committee about abusive actions carried out by the FBI against people because of their dissent, the committee's hearings also were notable for the insights elicited from FBI officials about the rationale for Hoover's abusive intelligence operations.
When asked if, during the execution of COINTELPRO operations, anybody at the FBI had discussed the operations' constitutionality or legality, the former head of the bureau's Racial Intelligence Section,
George Moore, answered,
“No, we never gave it a thought.”
William C. Sullivan, the head of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division for ten years and the person responsible for some of the worst elements of the bureau's long campaign to destroy Martin Luther King, confirmed that analysis when he told the Church Committee:
Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: “Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?” We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning
because we were just naturally pragmatic. The one thing we were concerned about, will this course of action work, will it get us what we want, will we reach the objective we desire to reach.
Schwarz has concluded that the “assumption of everlasting secrecy” was the key to understanding why the director assumed he could get away with abusing Americans and could create an atmosphere where integrity was not an issue. “The expectation of permanent secrecy and no effective oversight led many to ignore the law.”
In its final report, the Church Committee's conclusions about COINTELPRO included this observation:
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”
Among all of the political operations conducted by the bureau, surely the most egregious was the one conducted against the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Hoover's attitude toward King can be described as a nearly savage hatred. That extreme quality is evident in many COINTELPRO operations, but may be most evident in the records of FBI plots against black people, especially the years-long multifaceted operation designed to destroy King, the best-known and most respected civil rights leader. The plot involved office break-ins, use of informers, mail opening, wiretapping, and bugging of King's office, home, and hotel rooms. In one of the most extreme operations against King, the bureau attempted to convince him to commit suicide just weeks before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964. In another extreme measure, Hoover instructed agents not to inform King about advance notice it had received about threats against his life. Hoover told President Johnson he regarded King as “an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.”
As King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, widely considered one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, before 250,000 people who had come to the March on Washington to support civil rights and urge passage of the Civil Rights Act, top officials of the FBI listened to the speech in their offices
a few blocks away at FBI headquarters and decided it was the speech of a demagogue who should be toppled by the bureau. It was then that Hoover and other officials at headquarters started to plot King's demise. They also had the audacity to assume the FBI should surreptitiously select someone to replace King as the leader of black Americans.
Hoover's tendency to be particularly cruel to African Americans was also evident in the planting of false rumors that set off violent confrontations between black organizations. It was evident in his seemingly casual, callous attitude toward setting up the murder of one black man, Fred Hampton, and allowing another black man,
Geronimo Pratt, to be falsely convicted for murder.
Chicago Black Panther leader Hampton was shot dead in his sleep in his apartment by Chicago police after a diagram of his apartment, including where he slept, was given to police by an FBI informant with a spot on the diagram marked “Fred's bed.” In internal documents, the FBI took credit for the killing. The information the informer provided, wrote an agent, was considered to be of “tremendous value” to the “success of the raid.” After the raid that resulted in the killing of Hampton and
Mark Clark, a member of the Panthers' Peoria chapter, the FBI installed wiretaps on the phones of the survivors of the raid so agents could listen to them talk with their lawyers. The bureau gave the FBI informer who provided the floor plan a bonus.
Pratt, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran and Black Panther leader in Los Angeles, spent twenty-seven years in prison for a murder conviction that was overturned in 1997 by an Orange County judge who ruled that evidence that could have led to Pratt's acquittal was concealed by the FBI at his trial. He was convicted on the basis of testimony of an FBI informer who lied at the trial.
The FBI's approach to investigating the Black Panther Party was in the spirit of the worst of the COINTELPRO operationsâset up people to destroy one another. Testimony at the Church hearings revealed that the bureau's national effort to destroy the Panthers involved using informants and disinformation to promote gang warfare between Panthers and other black organizations and also to promote intramural violence within branches of the party. These bureau efforts were believed to be responsible for the deaths of at least four Black Panthers who were shot to death.
Violence was promoted by the FBI in black organizations so often in the late 1960s and early 1970s that it is impossible, in retrospect, to know whether any given violent confrontation that took place in that era
was instigated by genuine animosities among actual members of the groups or was instigated by FBI agents or informers, many of whom infiltrated such groups and promoted violence.
The sad conundrum of whether the FBI was the source of violent episodes and internal distrust in organizations in that era came to light in 2012 in two communities.
People knowledgeable of the history of the Black Panther Party in Northern California were shocked when journalist
Seth Rosenfeld reported FBI documentation that the late
Richard Aoki, a deeply respected leader in ethnic studies in the Bay Area and a member of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, was an FBI informer for many years, including at the time he armed the Oakland Panthers and taught them how to use the weapons he supplied.
In Memphis, people were stunned in 2013 when the FBI confirmed that the late
Ernest Withers, the best-known and beloved photographer of the civil rights movement and of life in Memphis, was an FBI informer during the years he photographed all the major events in the movement from 1958 until 1972. Throughout that time he worked closely with key people in the movement, including Martin Luther King. During that time he filed reports with the FBI, including ones on King at the time of the sanitation workers' strike that brought King to Memphis the week he was killed there in April 1968. Withers secretly supplied the FBI with photographs of King and others in the civil rights movement and also filed reports with agents about conversations he heard among movement members.
