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How COINTELPRO Helped Destroy the Movements of the 1960s
How COINTELPRO Helped Destroy the Movements of the 1960s
Since COINTELPRO was used mainly against the progressive
movements of the 1960s, its impact can be grasped only in the context
of the momentous social upheaval which shook the country during
those years.
All across the United States, Black communities came alive with
renewed political struggle. Most major cities experienced sustained,
disciplined Black protest and massive ghetto uprisings. Black
activists galvanized multi-racial rebellion among GIs, welfare
mothers, students, and prisoners.
College campuses and high schools erupted in militant protest against
the Vietnam War. A predominantly white New Left, inspired by the
Black movement, fought for an end to U.S. intervention abroad and a
more humane and cooperative way of life at home. By the late 1960s,
deep-rooted resistance had revived among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans,
Asian Americans, and Native Americans. A second wave of broad-
based strugglefor women's liberation had also emerged, along with
significant efforts by lesbians, gay men, and disabled people.
Millions of people in the United States began to reject the dominant
ideology and culture. Thousands challenged basic U.S. political and
economic institutions. For a brief moment, "the crucial mixture of
people's confidence in the government and lack of confidence in
themselves which allows the government to govern, the ruling class to
rule...threatened to break down."
By the mid-1970s, this upheaval had largely subsided. Important
progressive activity persisted, mainly on a local level, and much
continued to be learned and won, but the massive, militant Black and
New Left movements were gone. The sense of infinite possibility and
of our collective power to shape the future had been lost. Progressive
momentum dissipated. Radicals found themselves on the defensive as
right-wing extremists gained major government positions and defined
the contours of accepted political debate.
Many factors besides COINTELPRO contributed to this change.
Important progress was made toward achieving movement goals such
as Black civil rights, an end to the Vietnam War, and university
reform. The mass media, owned by big business and cowed by
government and right-wing attack, helped to bury radical activism by
ceasing to cover it. Television, popular magazines, and daily papers
stereotyped Blacks as hardened criminals and welfare chiselers or as
the supposedly affluent beneficiaries of reverse "discrimination."
White youth were portrayed first as hedonistic hippies and mindless
terrorists, later as an apolitical, self-indulgent "me generation." Both
were scapegoated as threats to "decent, hard-working Middle
America."
During the severe economic recession of the early- to mid- 1970s,
former student activists began entering the job market, some taking on
responsibility for children. Many were scared by brutal government
and right-wing attacks culminating in the murder of rank-and-file
activists as well as prominent leaders. Some were strung out on the
hard drugs that had become increasingly available in Black and Latin
communities and among white youth. Others were disillusioned by
mistreatment in movements ravaged by the very social sicknesses they
sought to eradicate, including racism, sexism, homophobia, class bias
and competition.
Limited by their upbringing, social position, and isolation from older
radical traditions, 1960s activists were unable to make the
connections and changes required to build movements strong enough
to survive and eventually win structural change in the United States.
Middle-class students did not sufficiently ally with working and poor
people. Too few white activists accepted third world leadership of
multi-racial alliances. Too many men refused to practice genuine
gender equality.
Originally motivated by goals of quick reforms, 1960s activists were
ill-prepared for the long-term struggles in which they found
themselves. Overly dependent on media-oriented superstars and one-
shot dramatic actions, they failed to develop stable organizations,
accountable leadership, and strategic perspective. Creatures of the
culture they so despised, they often lacked the patience to sustain
tedious grassroots work and painstaking analysis of actual social
conditions. They found it hard to accept the slow, uneven pace of
personal and political change.
This combination of circumstances, however, did not by itself
guarantee political collapse. The achievements of the 1960s
movements could have inspired optimism and provided a sense of the
power to win other important struggles. The rightward shift of the
major media could have enabled alternative newspapers, magazines,
theater, film, and video to attract a broader audience and stable
funding. The economic downturn of the early 1970s could have
united Black militants, New Leftists, and workers in common
struggle. Police brutality and government collusion in drug trafficking
could have been exposed in ways that undermined support for the
authorities and broadened the movements' backing.
By the close of the decade, many of the movements' internal
weaknesses were starting to be addressed. Black-led multi-racial
alliances, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign
and the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition, were forming. The
movements' class base was broadening through Black "revolutionary
unions" in auto and other industries, King's increasing focus on
economic issues, the New Left's spread to community colleges, and
the return of working-class GIs radicalized by their experience in
Vietnam. At the same time, the women's movement was confronting
the deep sexism which permeated 1960s activism, along with its
corollaries: homophobia, sexual violence, militarism,
competitiveness, and top-down decision-making.
While the problems of the 1960s movements were enormous, their
strengths might have enabled them to overcome their weaknesses had
the upsurge not been stifled before activists could learn from their
mistakes. Much of the movements' inability to transcend their initial
limitations and overcome adversity can be traced to COINTELPRO.
It was through COINTELPRO that the public image of Blacks and
New Leftists was distorted to legitimize their arrest and imprisonment
and scapegoat them as the cause of working people's problems. The
FBI and police instigated violence and fabricated movement horrors.
Dissidents were deliberately "criminalized" through false charges,
frame-ups, and offensive, bogus leaflets and other materials published
in their name. (Specific examples of these and other COINTELPRO
operations are presented on pages 41-65.)
COINTELPRO enabled the FBI and police to exacerbate the
movements' internal stresses until beleaguered activists turned on one
another. Whites were pitted against Blacks, Blacks against Chicanos
and Puerto Ricans, students against workers, workers against people
on welfare, men against women, religious activists against atheists,
Christians against Jews, Jews against Muslims. "Anonymous"
accusations of infidelity ripped couples apart. Backers of women's
and gay liberation were attacked as "dykes" or "faggots." Money was
repeatedly stolen and precious equipment sabotaged to intensify
pressure and sow suspicion and mistrust.
Otherwise manageable disagreements were inflamed by
COINTELPRO until they erupted into hostile splits that shattered
alliances, tore groups apart, and drove dedicated activists out of the
movement. Government documents implicate the FBI and police in
the bitter break-up of such pivotal groups as the Black Panther Party,
SDS, and the Liberation News Service, and in the collapse of
repeated efforts to form long-term coalitions across racial, class, and
regional lines. While genuine political issues were often involved in
these disputes, the outcome could have been different if government
agencies had not covertly intervened to subvert compromise and fuel
hostility and competition.
Finally, it was COINTELPRO that enabled the FBI and police to
eliminate the leaders of mass movements without undermining the
image of the United States as a democracy, complete with free speech
and the rule of law. Charismatic orators and dynamic organizers were
covertly attacked and "neutralized" before their skills could be
transferred to others and stable structures established to carry on their
work. Malcolm X was killed in a "factional dispute" which the FBI
took credit for having "developed" in the Nation of Islam. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was the target of an elaborate FBI plot to drive him to
suicide and replace him "in his role of the leadership of the Negro
people" with conservative Black lawyer Samuel Pierce (later named to
Reagan's cabinet). Many have come to view King's eventual
assassination (and Malcolm's as well) as itself a domestic covert
operation.
Other prominent radicals faced similar attack when they began to
develop broad followings and express anti-capitalist ideas. Some
were portrayed as crooks, thugs, philanderers, or government agents,
while others were physically threatened or assaulted until they
abandoned their work. Still others were murdered under phony
pretexts, such as "shootouts" in which the only shots were fired by
the police.
To help bring down a major target, the FBI often combined these
approaches in strategic sequence. Take the case of the "underground
press," a network of some 400 radical weeklies and several national
news services, which once boasted a combined readership of close to
30 million. In the late 1960s, government agents raided the offices of
alternative newspapers across the country in purported pursuit of
drugs and fugitives. In the process, they destroyed typewriters,
cameras, printing presses, layout equipment, business records, and
research files, and roughed up and jailed staffers on bogus charges.
Meanwhile, the FBI was persuading record companies to withdraw
lucrative advertising and arranging for printers, suppliers, and
distributors to drop underground press accounts. With their already
shaky operations in disarray, the papers and news services were easy
targets for a final phase of COINTELPRO disruption. Forged
correspondence, anonymous accusations, and infiltrators'
manipulation provoked a flurry of wild charges and counter-charges
that played a major role in bringing many of these promising
endeavors to a premature end.
A similar pattern can be discerned from the history of the Black
Panther Party. Brutal government attacks initially elicited broad
support for this new, militant, highly visible national organization
and its popular ten-point socialist program for Black self-
determination. But the FBI's repressive onslaught severely weakened
the Party, making it vulnerable to sophisticated FBI psychological
warfare which so discredited and shattered it that few people today
have any notion of the power and potential that the Panthers once
represented.
What proved most devastating in all of this was the effective
manipulation of the victims of COINTELPRO into blaming
themselves. Since the FBI and police operated covertly, the horrors
they engineered appeared to emanate from within the movements.
Activists' trust in one another and in their collective power was
subverted, and the hopes of a generation died, leaving a legacy of
cynicism and despair which continues to haunt us today.
THE DANGER WE FACE
Domestic Covert Action Remains a Serious Threat Today
The public exposure of COINTELPRO and other government abuses
elicited a flurry of apparent reform in the 1970s. President Nixon
resigned in the face of impeachment. His Attorney General, other top
aides, and many of the "plumbers" were prosecuted and imprisoned
for brief periods. The CIA's director and counter-intelligence chief
were ousted, and the CIA and the Army were again directed to cease
covert operations against domestic targets.
The FBI had formally shut down COINTELPRO a few weeks after it
was uncovered. As part of the general face-lift, the Bureau publicly
apologized for COINTELPRO, and municipal governments began to
disband the local police "red squads" that had served as the FBI's
main accomplices. A new Attorney General notified several hundred
activists that they had been victims of COINTELPRO and issued
guidelines limiting future operations. Top FBI officials were indicted
for ordering the burglary of activists' offices and homes; two were
convicted, and several others retired or resigned. The Bureau's
egomaniacal, crudely racist and sexist founder, J. Edgar Hoover, died
in 1972. After two interim directors failed to stem the tide of
criticism, a prestigious federal judge, William Webster, was
appointed by President Carter to clean house and build a "new FBI."
Behind this public hoopla, however, the Bureau's war at home
continued unabated. Domestic covert action did not end when it was
exposed in the 1970s. It has persisted throughout the 1980s and
become a permanent feature of U.S. government.
Domestic Covert Action Did Not End in the 1970s
Director Webster's highly touted reforms did not create a "new FBI."
They served mainly to modernize the existing Bureau and to make it
even more dangerous. In place of the backbiting competition with
other law enforcement and intelligence agencies which had previously
impeded coordination of domestic counter-insurgency, Webster
promoted inter-agency cooperation. Adopting the mantle of an "equal
opportunity employer," his FBI hired women and people of color to
more effectively penetrate a broader range of political targets. By
cultivating a low-visibility image and discreetly avoiding public
attack on prominent liberals, Webster gradually restored the Bureau's
respectability and won over a number ofits former critics.
State and local police similarly upgraded their repressive capabilities
in the 1970s while learning to present a more friendly public face.
The "red squads" that had harassed 1960s activists were quietly
resurrected under other names. Paramilitary SWAT teams and tactical
squads were formed, along with highly politicized "community
relations" and "beat rep" programs featuring conspicuous Black,
Latin, and female officers. Generous federal funding and
sophisticated technology became available through the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration, while FBI-led "joint anti-
terrorist task forces" introduced a new level of inter-agency
coordination.
Meanwhile, the CIA continued to use university professors,
journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations,
and philanthropic fronts to mold U.S. public opinion. At the same
time, Army Special Forces and other elite military units began to train
local police for counter-insurgency and to intensify their own
preparations, following the guidelines of the secret Pentagon
contingency plans, "Garden Plot" and "Cable Splicer." They drew
increasingly on manuals based on the British colonial experience in
Kenya and Northern Ireland, which teach the essential methodology
of COINTELPRO under the rubric of "low-intensity warfare," and
stress early intervention to neutralize potential opposition before it
can take hold.
While domestic covert operations were scaled down once the 1960s
upsurge had subsided (thanks in part to the success of
COINTELPRO), they did notstop. In its April 27, 1971 directives
disbanding COINTELPRO, the FBI provided for future covert action
to continue "with tight procedures to ensure absolute security." The
results are apparent in the record of 1970s covert operations which
have so far come to light:
The Native American Movement: 1970s FBI attacks on resurgent
Native American resistance have been well documented by Ward
Churchill and others. In 1973, the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion
of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian
Movement (AIM) activists gathered there for symbolic protests at
Wounded Knee, the site of an earlier U.S. massacre of Native
Americans. The FBI directed the entire 71-day siege, deploying
federal marshals, U.S. Army personnel, Bureau of Indian Affairs
police, local GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed
tribal vigilante force), and a vast array of heavy weaponry.
In the following years, 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.[f-45>
To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it,
the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological
warfare.
Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to
reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian savage." In
one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that AIM "Dog Soldiers"
planned widespread "sniping at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in
South Dakota. The son of liberal U.S. Senator (and Arab-American
activist) James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the
Bureau issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the
country.
To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members
Paul "Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings for the
brutal murder of a Los Angeles taxi driver. A bogus AIM note taking
credit for the killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder
site, along with a bundle of hair said to be the victim's "scalp."
Newspaper headlines screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical
Indians." By the time the defendants were finally cleared of the
spurious charges, many of AIM's main financial backers had been
scared away and its work among a major urban concentration of
Native people was in ruin.
In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national
security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover
operative for the FBI. As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal
Defense/Offense Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and
other Native American leaders, Durham had routinely participated in
confidential strategy sessions. He confessed to stealing organizational
funds during his two years with AIM, and to setting up the arrest of
AIM militants for actions he had organized. It was Durham who
authored the AIM documents that the FBI consistently cited to
demonstrate the group's supposed violent tendencies.
Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee
announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on
FBI operations against AIM. Three days later, armed FBI agents
assaulted an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the
smoke cleared, AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents
lay dead. The media, barred from the scene "to preserve the evidence,"
broadcast the Bureau's false accounts of a bloody "Indian ambush,"
and the congressional hearings were quietly cancelled.
The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of
resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman of the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale military-type
invasion of the reservation"[f-46> complete with M-16s, Huey
helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. Eventually
AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agents' deaths before a
right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI. AIM member Anna
Mae Aquash was found murdered after FBI agents threatened to kill
her unless she helped them to frame Peltier. Peltier's conviction,
based on perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was
upheld on appeal. (The panel of federal judges included William
Webster until the very day of his official appointment as Director of
the FBI.) Despite mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial,
and Amnesty International's call for a review of his case, the Native
American leader remains in maximum security prison.
The Black Movement: Government covert action against Black
activists also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from
community-based groups to the Provisional Government of the
Republic of New Afrika and the surviving remnants of the Black
Panther Party.
In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and
disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based
grassroots civil rights group struggling to stop Klan violence. In
California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry,
code-named "Othello," infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups
and took personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers
Workshop's multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in
1973. The Los Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating
at least seven 1970s community groups, including the Black-led
Coalition Against Police Abuse.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police to
frame nine local civil rights workers and the Rev. Ben Chavis, field
organizer for the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church
of Christ. Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help Black
communities respondto escalating racist violence against school
desegregation. Instead of arresting Klansmen, the ATF and police
coerced three young Black prisoners into falsely accusing Chavis and
the others of burning white-owned property. Although all three
prisoners later admitted they had lied in response to official threats
and bribes, the FBI found no impropriety. The courts repeatedly
refused to reopen the case and the Wilmington Ten served many years
in prison before pressure from international religious and human
rights groups won their release.
As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous
Black economic and political institutions in the deep South, the
Bureau repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to
buy land. On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed end of
COINTELPRO, the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn
assault on national RNA offices in Jackson, Mississippi. Carrying a
warrant for a fugitive who had been brought to RNA Headquarters by
FBI informer Thomas Spells, the attackers concentrated their fire
where the informer's floor plan indicated that RNA President Imari
Obadele slept. Though Obadele was away at the time of the raid, the
Bureau had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to
assault a government agent.
The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panthers'
organization and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenseless
as the government moved to prevent them from regrouping. On
August 21, 1971, national Party officer George Jackson, world-
renowned author of the political autobiography [Soledad Brother,]
was murdered by San Quentin prison authorities on the pretext of an
attempted jailbreak. In July 1972, Southern California Panther leader
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was successfully framed for a senseless $70
robbery-murder committed while he was hundreds of miles away in
Oakland, California, attending Black Panther meetings for which the
FBI managed to "lose" all of its surveillance records. Documents
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act later revealed that
at least two FBI agents had infiltrated Pratt's defense committee. They
also indicated that the state's main witness, Julio Butler, was a paid
informer who had worked in the Party under the direction of the FBI
and the Los Angeles Police Department. For many years, FBI
Director Webster publicly denied that Pratt had ever been a
COINTELPRO target, despite the documentary proof in his own
agency's records.
Also targeted well into the 1970s were former Panthers assigned to
form an underground to defend against armed government attack on
the Party. It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation
Army (BLA) when the Party was destroyed. FBI files show that,
within a month of the close of COINTELPRO, further Bureau
operations against the BLA were mapped out in secret meetings
convened by presidential aide John Ehrlichman and attended by
President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell. In the following
years, many former Panther leaders were murdered by the police in
supposed "shoot-outs" with the BLA. Others, such as Sundiata Acoli,
Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid Bin Wahad (formerly Richard
Moore), and the New York 3 (Herman Bell, Anthony "Jalil" Bottom,
and Albert "Nuh" Washington) were sentenced to long prison terms
after rigged trials.
In the case of the New York 3, FBI ballistics reports withheld during
their mid-1970s trials show that bullets from an alleged murder
weapon did not match those found at the site of the killings for which
they are still serving life terms. The star witness against them has
publicly recanted his testimony, swearing that he lied after being
tortured by police (who repeatedly jammed an electric cattleprod into
his testicles) and secretly threatened by the prosecutor and judge. The
same judge later dismissed petitions to reopen the case, refusing to
hold any hearing or to disqualify himself, even though his misconduct
is a major issue. As the NY3 continued to press for a new trial, their
evidence was ignored by the news media while their former
prosecutor's one-sided, racist "docudrama" on the case, (Badge of the
Assassin,) aired on national television.
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