COINTELPRO
(Counterintelligence Program)
[back] FBI
["COINTELPRO was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s.....The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally- protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world."--Brian Glick.]
See: War Against Alternative Medicine
See: Mockingbird CHAOS [2009 July] Judaic Front Group Secretly Promotes Neo-Nazism
Paul Wolf William Schaap Brian Glick Angus Mackenzie Jim Vander Wall
Articles
[2009 Nov]
The Jimi Hendrix Political Harassment, Kidnap and Murder Experience
by Alex Constantine
[2006] A break-in to end all break-ins. In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
COINTELPRO Revisited - Spying & Disruption By Brian Glick
COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
The Hunt for Red Menace: Evidence is Immaterial. COINTELPRO Media Operations
[2002] FBI on Trial. Jury awards $4.4 million to a pair of Earth First activists by Christine Keyser
[2002] Bombed and framed. FBI pays millions in damages to eco-activists by Andy Howell
[1997] How the CIA Got Away With Domestic Spying
Timelines:
Department Of Army Report On The Use Of Chemical Agent Research, Intelligence
Corps Experimentation With Hallucinogenic Drugs.
Summary Of CIA Testing Of Lsd, Chemicals For Altering Human Behavior With A Wide
Variety Of Methods.
Summary Of FBI Counter Intelligence Operations As Applied To Stated "Apostles Of
Non-Violence," "New Left," "Advocates Of New Lifestyles"
Victims
Leonard Peltier
Books
[1999] WAR AT HOME
by Brian Glick
[1999] SECRETS The CIA's War at Home By Angus Mackenzie
FBI Secrets -- An Agent's Expose by M. Wesley Swearingen
A WRIT FOR MARTYRS by Eustace Mullins The FBI’s illegal campaign to forever silence the message of dissident Eustace Mullins
External
COINTELPRO The Sabotage Of Legitimate Dissent
COINTELPRO: THE FBI WAR
AGAINST LEONARD PELTIER
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/FBI_watch.html
Quotes
The FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native
people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge
reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the
Pinochet regime in Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public
protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological
warfare. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian
Glick
Within months of taking office, Reagan pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, the only FBI officials convicted of COINTELPRO crimes. His congressional allies publicly honored these criminals and praised their work. The President continually revived the tired old Red Scare, adding a new "terrorist" bogeyman, while Attorney General Meese campaigned to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights and limit judicial review of the constitutionality of government action. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian Glick
"Black bag jobs" are burglaries performed in order to obtain the written materials, mailing lists, position papers, and internal documents of an organization or an individual. At least 10,000 American homes have been subjected to illegal breaking and entering by the FBI, without judicial warrants. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
Then on March 8, 1971, a group calling itself the Citizen's
Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into an FBI office in a small town
called Media, Pennsylvania. They subjected the FBI to what the FBI has been
habitually subjecting political dissidents to throughout the course of its
history. That is, in Bureau parlance, a black bag job. The information they
obtained was widely distributed through left and peace movement channels, and
summarized the following week in the Washington Post.
An analysis of the documents in this FBI office revealed that 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 - only 15% - concerned bank
robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.
COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
According to FBI memoranda of the 1960s, "Key black activists" were repeatedly arrested "on any excuse" until "they could no longer make bail." The FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts, to frame COINTELPRO targets for crimes they knew they did not commit. In some cases the charges were quite serious, including murder. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
Many counterintelligence techniques involve the use of paid informants. Informants become agents provocateurs by raising controversial issues at meetings to take advantage of ideological divisions, by promoting emnity with other groups, or by inciting the group to violent acts, even to the point of providing them with weapons. Over the years, FBI provocateurs have repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, attacks on police, bombings, and so on, following an old strategy of Tsarist police director TC Zubatov: "We shall provoke you to acts of terror and then crush you." COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
A concise description of political warfare is given in a passage from a CIA
paper entitled "Nerve War Against Individuals," referring to the overthrowing of
the government of Guatemala in 1954:
The strength of an enemy consists largely of the individuals who occupy key
positions in the enemy organization, as leaders, speakers, writers, organizers,
cabinet members, senior government officials, army commanders and staff
officers, and so forth. Any effort to defeat the enemy must therefore
concentrate to a great extent upon these key enemy individuals.
If such an effort is made by means
short of physical violence, we call it "psychological warfare." If it is
focussed less upon convincing those individuals by logical reasoning, but
primarily upon moving them in the desired direction by means of harassment, by
frightening, confusing and misleading them, we speak of a "nerve war".
The COINTELPROs clearly met the
above definition of "nerve wars," and, in the case of the American Indian
Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the FBI conducted a full-fledged
counterinsurgency war, complete with death squads, disappearances and
assassinations, recalling Guatemala in more recent years.
The full story of COINTELPRO may
never be told. The Bureau's files were never seized by Congress or the courts or
sent to the National Archives. Some have been destroyed. Many
counterintelligence operations were never committed to writing as such, or
involve open investigations, and ex-operatives are legally prohibited from
talking about them. Most operations remain secret until long after the damage
has been done
COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
Between 1968-1971, FBI-initiated terror and disruption resulted in the murder of Black Panthers Arthur Morris, Bobby Hutton, Steven Bartholomew, Robert Lawrence, Tommy Lewis, Welton Armstead, Frank Diggs, Alprentice Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, John Savage, Sylvester Bell, Larry Roberson, Nathaniel Clark, Walter Touré Pope, Spurgeon Winters, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Sterling Jones, Eugene Anderson, Babatunde X Omarwali, Carl Hampton, Jonathan Jackson, Fred Bennett, Sandra Lane Pratt, Robert Webb, Samuel Napier, Harold Russell, and George Jackson. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
The Chicago Special Agent in Charge, Marlin Johnson, who also oversaw the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, makes it quite obvious that he views the murder of Malcolm X as something of a model for "successful" counterintelligence operations. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
During the 1960's, the FBI's role was not to protect civil rights workers,
but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku
Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror.
Church Committee hearings and
internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan
members during the period were FBI agents or informants. 44 However, Bureau
intelligence "assets" were neither neutral observers nor objective
investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that
claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964.
Bureau spies were elected to top
leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. 45 Needless to say, the
informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting
the Klan's fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist
acts would only confirm the infiltrator's loyalty and commitment.
Unlike slick Hollywood
popularizations of the period, such as Alan Parker's film, "Mississippi
Burning," the FBI was instrumental in building the Ku Klux Klan in the South
COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
Virtually every known AIM leader in the United States has been incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly. After the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those it identified as "key AIM leaders." This resulted in 15 convictions, all on such petty or contrived offenses as "interfering with a federal officer in the performance of his duty." Russell Means was faced with 37 felony and three misdemeanor charges, none of which held up in court. Organization members often languished in jail for months as the cumulative bail required to free them outstripped resource capabilities of AIM and supporting groups. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
Most people, when they think of the FBI, have an image from
movies like Mississippi Burning and characters like Clarice Sterling from
Silence of the Lambs. The media image of the CIA and NSA is much more sinister,
but most people think of the FBI purely as a crime fighting organization.
The FBI has been very successful at
disrupting and destroying perfectly legitimate organizations involved in dissent
- They would like to project the image of crime fighters, but it is not really
their principal role.
......What they have been very successful at is
disrupting and destroying perfectly legitimate organizations involved in
dissent: civil right organizations, women's organizations, generally
organizations on the left. So while they would like to project the image of
crime fighters, it is not really the principal role of the FBI.
[Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
In many ways, the stark unwillingness of the federal government to accord
Leonard Peltier even a modicum of elementary justice is symbolic of the entire
AIM experience during the 1970s and, more broadly posed, of the U.S.
relationship to American Indians since the first moment of the republic. The
message embedded, not only in Peltier's imprisonment, but in the scores of
murders, hundreds of shootings and beatings, endless show trials and all the
rest of the systematic terrorization marking the FBI's anti-AIM campaign on Pine
Ridge, was that the Bureau could and would make it cost-prohibitive for Indians
to seriously challenge the lot assigned them by policy-makers and economic
planners in Washington, D.C. The internal colonization of Native America is
intended to be absolute and unequivocal.
.......In 1953, just prior to the
passage of PL-280, Felix Cohen, one of the foremost scholars of
Indian law compared the role of the Indians in America to that
of the Jews in modem Germany. He noted that, "Like the miner's
canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison air
in our political atmosphere ... our treatment of Indians, even
more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise
and fall of our democratic faith." 213 Given that all
that happened on and around Pine Ridge occurred long after
COINTELPRO allegedly became no more than a "regrettable
historical anomaly," 214 Cohen's insight holds
particular significance for all Americans. In essence, if we may ascertain that
COINTELPRO remained alive and well years after it was supposed to have died, we
may assume it lives on today. And that, to be sure, is a danger to the lives and
liberties of everyone.
[1990] The COINTELPRO
Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward
Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.
COINTELPRO was an acronym that the FBI had for its counter intelligence
programs. Now normal counter intelligence is something carried out by most
intelligence organizations and it basically means looking for spies in your own
organization or looking for spies in the populace as a whole. So counter
intelligence in its normal parlance would mean activities designed to detect and
combat espionage. Within the FBI, it was actually a code word for their programs
to infiltrate and disrupt legitimate legal organizations engaged in activities
that the government found objectionable. It
can range simply from sowing dissent within the organization to, at the other
extreme, assassination of the leadership of the organization or the framing of
key personnel in the organization on bogus criminal charges and supporting those
with fabricated evidence to obtain convictions. [Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
Officially, it ended in 1973, but what apparently ended was the use of the term
COINTELPRO, because the same sort of activities were conducted against the
American Indian movement by the same personnel in the period from 1973 to 1977,
for example. [Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
So that if you're talking about first oil in Oklahoma, and then low-sulfur
coal and uranium in the West, those mineral deposits lay principally on the
lands of indigenous people. This led to an outright war on the Pine Ridge
Reservation with a group called the Goons, being sponsored by the FBI and the
U.S. government and the American Indian movement and local organizations like
the Independent Oglala Nation supporting native sovereignty and traditional ways
of life.
During the period from 1973 to
1975, at least 60 people were killed by the Goon squads on the Pine Ridge
Reservation, and I say at least because these are reported homicides. It is
probably much larger than that because the agency to which you would report a
homicide was the FBI, who were of course sponsoring the people committing the
homicides. So a lot of assaults and murders went unreported. On June 25, 1975,
the FBI went on to a property called the Jumping Bull Compound on Pine Ridge
supposedly looking for Jimmy Eagle, who was a young Native American man, on
charges of having stolen a pair of cowboy boots.
The real reason for them being
there was that there was an AIM encampment there and when they encountered
people from the encampment, a firefight ensued and the two FBI agents who went
in - Ron Williams and Jack Coler were killed in the firefight, as well as AIM
member, Joseph Stuntz. Leonard Peltier wound up being framed for those murders
and when I say framed, I mean that the FBI coerced witnesses and fabricated
evidence in order to obtain a conviction.
.....Peltier has now been down in federal prisons
since 1976 on bogus charges and fabricated evidence. [Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
One of the other operations the FBI was into was people working for social
justice in Central America in the 80s. I was working with a group who was
helping mainly Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees find jobs in the Bay Area and
I remember our offices being broken into with nothing being taken… Later, I
found that seemed to be happening across the country with similar groups.
Basically what we had going on was
the U.S. supporting a massive terrorist campaign against the people of El
Salvador. And I mean terrorism in the very specific narrowly defined sense of
the word. We're talking about tens of thousands of political murders, torture
and so on. Rather than investigate the supporters of this terrorism in the U.S.,
the FBI of course investigated those people who opposed this terrorism and then
tried to help the victims of it. They did this by infiltrating the
organizations, attempting to indict people on immigration charges simply for
helping political refugees from terror that was being sponsored by the United
States. [Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
The FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian Glick
Within months of taking office, Reagan pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, the only FBI officials convicted of COINTELPRO crimes. His congressional allies publicly honored these criminals and praised their work. The President continually revived the tired old Red Scare, adding a new "terrorist" bogeyman, while Attorney General Meese campaigned to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights and limit judicial review of the constitutionality of government action. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian Glick
Harassment, intimidation and violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame- ups, and physical violence were threatened, instigated or directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the case of the Black and Native American movements, these assaults--including outright political assassinations--were so extensive and vicious that they amounted to terrorism on the part of the government. COINTELPRO Revisited - Spying & Disruption By Brian Glick