What is COINTELPRO? First, let’s talk about the benefits of undercover law enforcement. Infiltrators of criminal organizations place themselves in an ideal position to glean firsthand information about the major players in the crimes, the organizational framework, and the network perpetrating the crime. Ideally, this leads to massive arrests, a reduction in crime, and a chilling effect on further criminal operations. Same with spies in wartime. These activities are necessary.
Reducing serious crimes like murder, robbery, drug trafficking, human trafficking, fraud, rape, or winning a righteous war is a noble endeavor. For those who risk their lives in an honest effort at these aims, I salute you.
But … the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its director for life, J. Edgar Hoover, were on a whole different trip when they put together the COINTELPRO program in the 1950s. COINTELPRO is short for counterintelligence program. They decided to target the root of ideologically driven crimes, and social movements, to nip crime in the bud.
They officially started surveilling groups like the Communist Party, the KKK, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, and assorted civil rights and new left movements.
However, US law enforcement has a set of rules it’s required to follow in the course of its duties. It’s important to establish intent, capacity, and motive. Otherwise, targeting those who exercise their rights to assembly and free speech is a crime. And artificially stirring up trouble is entrapment. It smells of pre-crime enforcement, which will only get worse as law enforcement’s dependence on AI algorithms deepens.
If stuff pops off organically and ideas morph into dangerous illegal actions, then escalate the force against them. But, what pissed off the rabble-rousers in the 60s and 70s, was that they were illegally surveilling suspected members, and even infiltrating their groups. More despicable they were goading these groups to escalate. Most of the anti-Vietnam War protests were peaceful in the early days. But, the vibe got much uglier and violent over time giving law enforcement cause (particularly in the court of public opinion) for bringing down the hammer.
Many of the astute activists knew that agent provocateurs were steering the movements in a non-productive, harmful direction. Acts of noble civil disobedience began to rise. They started breaking into draft boards and destroying draft records, which mucked up the system in the pre-computer records days—well done! There were zero legitimate reasons for US participation in the Vietnam War.
One group, calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and absconded with a large cache of files in 1971.
Those files detailed much of the modus operandi for the COINTELPRO, including illegal spying on American citizens, and infiltration of several activist groups. Ultimately, the Washington Post brought this material to light as a wave of discontent and distrust of the government gave the Senate justification for launching Church Committee investigations of the US intelligence apparatus in 1973.
In 1976 the Church Committee published volumes of discovery on the secretive workings of the multitude of U.S. intelligence groups operating at home and abroad. Included in this report were details on the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.
I don’t know about Senator Frank Church’s true motivation for pushing these investigations. Still, with most special Congressional committees, the real aim is to disseminate enough material to make the investigation seem legit, coerce a mea culpa from the agencies with a promise never to do it again, and then bury the whole messy affair in the annals of history.
“We good?”
But, they never stopped. COINTELPRO did not end in the 70s. It may have kaizened its way to increasingly outrageous operations with blurring motivations–from the safety and wellbeing of U.S. citizens to driving the ideological Deep State apparatus. We’re not just talking about surveillance and infiltration in the aftermath of the Church Committee. The FBI has its own indoctrination and radicalization program. They see a small cadre of extremists, or mentally ill kids with too much time, and goad them into committing crimes, which are then blasted across the media to accentuate the growing problem of a certain cohort of the population.
Since the 1990s the primary target has been the Right, and specifically, constitution and 2A-loving conservatives: Ruby Ridge, Waco, OKC, and J6 come to mind. Fed fingerprints are all over those operations. And it’s worked beautifully, such that a presidential candidate can call at least a quarter of the country deplorable, and a sitting president can call members of the opposition party the greatest threat to American democracy, which pundits, politicians, and corporate media repeat far and wide.
What’s coming to light more and more is that the intelligence agencies are creating domestic terrorist movements out of whole cloth. They’re authoring the plots, radicalizing the grunts, hiring the contract agents, surfacing plea deal criminals, and compartmentalizing the work of actual FBI employees, so they can pull off operations.
They are a criminal organization, and in their brilliance, they can divide and conquer the American populace. It’s a strategy of dialectical tension to create enmity between ideological factions, foment chaos, and, ultimately, swoop in with tyrannical control to save the Republic.
Or if that seems like too much of a grand narrative. They also feature operation highlights in their end-of-year report as an irrefutable rationale for increased funding.
COINTELPRO never ended. Rather, the FBI integrated what it learned in the 1950s-70s into its standard operating procedures.
On a hopeful note, there’s a swell of people, who see telltale signs of Feds on social channels, chat rooms, forums, and even in real life. They call them glowies, as in it’s so obvious this person is working for the Feds that they glow like an LED collar in a defunct West Virginia coal mine.
Header image: JESSICA GRIFFIN/Philadelphia Inquirer
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