COINTELPRO
Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) conducted a campaign of
domestic counterintelligence. The agency’s
Domestic Intelligence Division did more than
simply spy on U.S. citizens and their organizations;
its ultimate goal was to disrupt, discredit,
and destroy certain political groups. The division’s operations were formally known within
the bureau as COINTELPRO (the Counterintelligence
Program). The brainchild of former FBI
director J. EDGAR HOOVER, the first COINTELPRO
campaign targeted the U.S. Communist
party in the mid-1950s. More organizations
came under attack in the 1960s. FBI agents
worked to subvert CIVIL RIGHTS groups, radical
organizations, and white supremacists. COINTELPRO
existed primarily because of Director
Hoover’s extreme politics and ended only when
he feared its exposure by his critics. A public
uproar followed revelations in the news media
in the early 1970s, and congressional hearings
criticized COINTELPRO campaigns in 1976.
In 1956 Hoover interpreted a recent federal
law—the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50
U.S.C.A. § 841)—as providing the general
authority for a covert campaign against the U.S.
Communist party. Officially, the law stripped
the party of “the rights, privileges, and immunities
attendant upon legal bodies created under
the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States.”
Hoover saw the party as a peril to national security
and ordered a large-scale effort to infiltrate
and destabilize it.
Employing classic ESPIONAGE techniques,
FBI agents joined the party and recruited
informants. They spread dissension at party
meetings by raising embarrassing questions
about the recent Soviet invasion of Hungary, for
instance, or about Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Soviet leader
JOSEPH STALIN, who had been a hero to U.S.
Communists. Agents also engaged in whispering
campaigns identifying party members to
employers and neighbors. The FBI intensified its
harassment by enlisting the INTERNAL REVENUE
SERVICE (IRS) to conduct selective tax audits of
party members.And it spread rumors within the
party itself—employing a practice known as
snitch jacketing—that painted loyal members as
FBI informants. In all, the government executed
1,388 separate documented efforts, and they
worked: whereas party membership was an estimated
twenty-two thousand in the early 1950s,
it fell to some three thousand by the end of 1957.
After his initial success, Hoover did not rest.
From the late 1950s through the end of the
1960s, he unleashed his agents against a wide
range of political groups. Some were civil rights
organizations, such as the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
CONFERENCE (SCLC). Others were radical,
such as the BLACK PANTHER PARTY, the
AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, and the Socialist
Workers party. Yet another target was the
nation’s oldest white hate group, the KU KLUX
KLAN, although Hoover was less enthusiastic
about pursuing it and did so chiefly because of
political pressure resulting from the Klan’s
highly publicized murders of civil rights workers.
In internal FBI memorandums, Hoover’s
motive for these operations is given as the need
to stamp out COMMUNISM and subversion, but
the historical record reveals a muddier picture.
What turned Hoover’s attention to the NAACP,
for example, was the organization’s criticism of
FBI hiring practices for excluding minorities.
In their scope and tactics, these FBI operations
occasionally went much further than the
original anti-Communist COINTELPRO effort.
They involved at least twenty documented burglaries
of the offices of the SCLC, an organization
headed by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Hoover detested King, whom he called “one of
the most reprehensible . . . individuals on the
American scene today,” and urged his agents to
use “imaginative and aggressive tactics” against
King and the SCLC. To this end, agents bugged
King’s hotel rooms; tape-recorded his infidelities;
and mailed a recording, along with a note
urging King to commit suicide, to the civil rights
leader’s wife. The COINTELPRO operation
against the radical Black Panther party, which
Hoover considered a black nationalist hate
group, tried to pit the party’s leaders against
each other while also fomenting violence
between the Panthers and an urban gang. In at
least one instance, FBI activities did lead to violence.
In 1969, an FBI informant’s tip culminated
in a police raid that killed Illinois Panther
chairman Fred Hampton and others; more than
a decade later, the federal government agreed to
pay restitution to the victims’ survivors, and a
federal judge sanctioned the bureau for covering
up the facts in the case.
Political changes in the early 1970s weakened
Hoover’s position. Critics in the media and
Congress began to question Hoover’s methods,
and the newly created FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
ACT (FOIA), 5 U.S.C.A. § 552, promised to
pierce the veil of secrecy that had always protected
him. In 1971, a break-in at an FBI field
office in Pennsylvania yielded secret documents
that were ultimately published. Fearing greater
exposure of FBI counterintelligence programs, Hoover formally canceled them on April 28,
1971. Some small-scale operations continued,
but the days when agents had carte blanche to
carry out the director’s will were over.
Hoover died May 2, 1972, at the age of seventy-
seven. His death was followed by the realization
of his greatest fear. In 1973 and 1974,
NBC reporter Carl Stern gained access to COINTELPRO
documents through an FOIA claim.
More revelations followed, producing a public
outcry and leading to an internal investigation
by Attorney General William B. Saxbe. The U.S.
Congress was next: in 1975 and 1976, hearings
of the House and Senate Select Committees on
Intelligence further probed COINTELPRO.
Even as Hoover’s legacy was laid bare, supporters
tried to keep the cover on: House lawmakers
kept their committee’s report secret. The Senate
did not; its report, released on April 28, 1976,
denounced a “pattern of reckless disregard of
activities that threatened our constitutional system.”
Along with revealing other instances of FBI
illegalities under Hoover, the investigation of his
activities set in motion a process of reform.
Congress ultimately limited the term of the
director of the FBI to ten years, to be served at
the pleasure of the president, a safeguard
designed to ensure that no single individual
could again run the bureau indefinitely and
without check. Details about COINTELPRO
continue to be made public through government
documents.
FURTHER READINGS
Gentry, Curt. 1991. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets.
New York: Norton.
Hakim, Joy. 1995. All the People: A History of Us. New York:
Oxford Univ. Press.
Kleinfelder, Rita L. 1993. When We Were Young: A Baby
Boomer Yearbook. New York: Prentice-Hall General Reference
& Travel.
Powers, Richard G. 1987. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J.
Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press.
