SYMHC Classics: COINTELPRO 1

Part 1 of this 2020 two-parter covers background on the FBI and on the origins of its counterintelligence programs, as well as one specific operation, called COINTELPRO-White Hate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and Happy Saturday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. Our next two Saturday Classics are a listener
request from a friend who is also a history teacher,
who noticed that she's been seeing a lot of references
to co Intel Pro on social media lately. We don't
often run two partners as Saturday Classics, but our episodes

(00:24):
on co Intel Pro are not one continuous narrative. Part
ones today we will talk about some background on the
FBI and the origins of its counterintelligence programs, as well
as one specific operation, which was called co Intel Pro
White Hate. Then next week, Part two will cover two
other co Intel pros and how the public learned about

(00:46):
these programs. These episodes are also an example of something
we said in this week's Behind the Scenes about not
needing to go back very far in history to find
precedence and things that resonate with things that are happening now.
We recorded our episodes on co Intel Pro in July
of twenty twenty, during international protests over the murder of

(01:07):
George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. This originally came
out July twentieth, twenty twenty Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome

(01:29):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Something that has come up several times on our show
is FBI surveillance of people who were associated with the
civil rights movement in the United States. Most recently, we
talked about the bureau creating this file on James Baldwin
that was more than seventeen hundred pages long, and in

(01:49):
earlier episodes we've talked about things like the FBI using
wiretaps to spy on Byerd Rustin and Martin Luther King Junior.
A lot of this surveillance was connected to a series
of counterintelligence programs, or co intel pros that primarily targeted
left wing organizations and people in the US from nineteen
fifty six until nineteen seventy one. The FBI framed this

(02:12):
as work that was necessary to prevent violence and protect
national security, but a whole lot of the people and
organizations that they targeted were not violent and were not
threatening national security. Mostly they were just threatening the status quo,
and the FBI pursued the one co intel pro that
really really was focused on violent organizations with a totally

(02:34):
different end in mind than what it pursued with the
other operations. This is one of those topics that includes
a whole lot of history that is just a complicated tangle,
So we're going to tackle it in two parts. Today,
we'll talk about the history of the FBI, especially as
it related to communism and perceived subversive threats, because all

(02:55):
that fed directly into co Intel Pro. We're also going
to give an o review of the types of tactics
that the FBI used across these various programs, and we're
going to talk about the one co intel pro that
was kind of an outlier in all of this, which
was cointel Pro White Hate. Next time, we will get
into some of the specifics of the co intel pros

(03:15):
that targeted black liberation organizations and the new Left, as
well as how these programs were finally exposed to the public.
The investigation team that would become the US Federal Bureau
of Investigation was established in nineteen oh eight, and at
first this was a small group of newly hired investigators
who worked for the Department of Justice under the Office

(03:36):
of the Chief Examiner. Before this point when the Department
of Justice needed investigators, it had either hired private investigators
or borrowed investigators from other departments. In nineteen oh nine,
the Office of the Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau
of Investigation. The Bureau's work involved enforcing federal law and

(03:56):
helping to protect the nation from threats. In nineteen seven,
just after the US entered World War One, Congress passed
the Espionage Act, or an Act to punish acts of
interference with Foreign relations, the neutrality of the foreign commerce
of the United States, to punish espionage and better to
enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for

(04:17):
other purposes. The Bureau of Investigation had become the government's
largest investigative agency, and it was tasked with enforcing the
Espionage Act. The Bureau of Investigation also had an assortment
of other duties, including guarding the US border with Mexico
during the Mexican Revolution. The same year that the Espionage
Act was passed, j Edgar Hoover joined the Department of Justice.

(04:42):
The following year, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which expanded
the Espionage Act to focus on anti war activists and socialists.
The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to quote, willfully,
utter print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurreless, or
abusive life language about the form of the government of

(05:02):
the United States. It also outlawed urging, inciting, or advocating
any curtailment or reduction in the production of war material. Then,
in nineteen nineteen, US Attorney General A. Mischel Palmer's home
was bombed. This was part of a series of male
bombings carried out that year, with seven other bombings happening

(05:23):
on that same night. We have a two part episode
on the bombings and the massive series of raids and
deportations that followed, and that two parter originally came out
in twenty sixteen. J Edgar Hoover led a team to
investigate these bombings, and the espionage and sedition acts were
a big part of it. The raids, incarcerations, and deportations

(05:44):
that followed became known as the Palmer Raids and they
were part of the first Red Scare, which was a
widespread fear of Bolshevists, anarchists, socialists, and immigrants as a
threat to American life and national security. By nineteen twenty,
Attorney General Arl Palmer's handling of these investigations had come
under intense scrutiny from both within and outside of the

(06:06):
US government. On May twenty eighth of that year, a
team of twelve lawyers issued a report on the raids
Mister port detailed cruel and unusual punishments, arrests without warrant,
unreasonable searches and seizures compelling persons to witness against themselves,
propaganda by the Department of Justice, and provocative agents, which

(06:26):
were basically operatives who entrapped people. Palmer's reputation suffered as
a result of all this, and he returned to private
practice after failing to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
William J. Flynn was director of the Bureau of Investigation
at the time, and soon he was replaced as well.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts were repealed in nineteen twenty

(06:48):
and nineteen twenty one, but Hoover's reputation wasn't really tarnished
by his involvement in all this. Soon he was being
groomed to take over the Bureau. Jay Edgar Hoover became
the Bureau of Investigations director in nineteen twenty four, and
the bureau was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
nineteen thirty five. Of course, there is a ton of

(07:10):
history between when Hoover joined the Department of Justice and
when the FBI started its co intel pros. Hoover was
involved in modernizing and standardizing the FBI, and the bureau
itself was involved in investigating organized crime during Prohibition. During
World War II, the FBI also maintained lists of Japanese, German,

(07:31):
and Italian nationals believed to be a threat to domestic
security and kept those people under surveillance. Then, of course,
Japanese immigrants and their American born descendants were incarcerated under
Executive Order ninety sixty six. That is also covered in
a previous two parter of the podcast. The Central Intelligence
Agency was founded in nineteen forty seven to focus on

(07:54):
foreign intelligence. That left the FBI to focus on domestic
intelligence and on investigationading federal crimes. This creation of the
CIA happened under the National Security Act of nineteen forty seven,
and that act also included this definition of counterintelligence quote
information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other

(08:17):
intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted by or on behalf
of foreign governments or elements thereof foreign organizations or foreign persons,
or international terrorist activities. A big part of this same
time span was the fight against communism. Following a precedent
that had been set by the Palmer Raids, the First

(08:39):
Red Scare, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts, in nineteen
forty Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, also known as
the Smith Act. In this act included clauses that made
it illegal for any citizen or resident of the US
to quote, advocate, a bet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability,

(08:59):
or propriety of overthrowing, or destroying any government in the
United States by force or violence. Just as the Espionage
and Sedition Acts had been used to target political dissenters
and immigrants, the Smith Act became a primary tool for
prosecuting communists. In nineteen forty eight, eleven leaders of the

(09:19):
Communist Party USA were tried and convicted under the Smith Act.
They hadn't been directly advocating for the overthrow of the
US government, but they had been teaching from works by
Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin that described the revolutionary overthrow
of governments as necessary. The Supreme Court upheld these convictions

(09:40):
in Dennis versus the United States in nineteen fifty one,
and this Court decision moved the country away from an
earlier standard that required evidence of a clear and present
danger in order to justify the government placing limits on
free speech. The focus on communism escalated during the Cold War.
W OR two had left the US and the USSR

(10:02):
as the two remaining superpowers, and at first the US
was the only one with nuclear weapons, but the Soviet
Union detonated its first to nuclear device in nineteen forty nine,
and soon it became clear that spies had been at
work within the US nuclear program. This sparked an increasing
fixation on the idea that Soviet agents were infiltrating the

(10:24):
United States, including through the US Communist Party. There was
also a more general fear of Communist infiltration, regardless of
whether a particular person or organization had ties back to
the Soviet Union. The House on American Activities Committee had
been established in nineteen thirty eight to investigate suspected disloyalty,

(10:45):
including ties to communism. During the Cold War, the committee's
activities became notorious under the direction of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
This was all part of the Second Red Scare, which
was another national panic, this time focused on the idea
of Communist infiltration. This panic grew out of the tensions
between the US and the USSR, and it was further

(11:07):
inflamed by other events like the Chinese Communist Revolution which
started in nineteen forty nine and the Korean War which
started in nineteen fifty. To be clear, some of the
people targeted by the House and American Activities Committee really
were communists or otherwise had ties to the Communist Party,
and there were some Communists who really did have ties

(11:28):
back to the Soviet Union and its leadership, even to
the point of spying on the US or expressing overt
loyalty to the Soviet Union and its leadership. But the
overall paranoia was disproportionate to the actual level of threat
or the number of Communists who had ties to the USSR.
That also went way beyond communism and started targeting more

(11:50):
general political activity and dissent. The Communist Party had advocated
for things like labor rights, civil rights, and women's rights,
and that made it really ease to brand anyone who
fought for these same causes as a communist, as McCarthy, Hoover,
and other public figures stoked existing fear and paranoia. The
government and private organizations tried to purge themselves of anyone

(12:14):
deemed to be disloyal or a security threat for any reason,
for example, anyone who might be susceptible to blackmail, and
the national climate was one of suspicion, repression, and fear.
By early nineteen fifty four, McCarthy's support was starting to
wane because of his aggressive tactics with the Committee. I

(12:34):
can't remember now if we mentioned this already, but there
are also is yet another two parter on this back
in the archive. After he accused several Army officers of
having Communist ties, his own behavior was investigated, and the
Senate voted to condemn his conduct on December second of
nineteen fifty four. Although the House on American Activities Committee
still existed, its prominence and its reputation declined through the

(12:57):
late nineteen fifties and sixties. In a lot of ways,
the FBI's co intel pros picked up where the House
on American Activities Committee left off, and we're going to
talk more about that after we paused for a sponsor break.

(13:19):
The FBI and the House on American Activities Committee were
actively working together during the McCarthy era, but the FBI
didn't really publicize what it was doing or try to
promote the overall idea that communists had infiltrated a lot
of American institutions, particularly Hollywood. It left that to the Committee,
whose activities were publicly known and reported in the press.

(13:40):
One of the papers that I read while researching all
of this described the FBI during this time as laundering
its intelligence and counterintelligence activities through the House on American
Activities Committee. So when the House and American Activities Committee
came under scrutiny in nineteen fifty four or its own

(14:01):
activities declined, but the FBI's related work did not. Instead,
Jay Edgar Hoover drew on the Communist Control Act of
nineteen fifty four or quote, an act to outlaw the
Communist Party, to prohibit members of communist organizations from serving
in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes nice and

(14:22):
specific there this Act banned the Communist Party of the
United States, framing it not as a legitimate political party.
But as a conspiracy to overthrow the government. This law
came out of this same ongoing fear and suspicion of communism,
and it also connected specifically to the labor movement. There
was some overlap between the Communist Party and union organizers,

(14:45):
and the act specifically banned members of the Communist Party
from holding office and labor organizations. This was purportedly to
protect unsuspecting workers from Communist subversion, but really it granted
the government a lot of of leeway to investigate labor
organizations and to invalidate their collective bargaining agreements if they

(15:06):
were determined to be communists infiltrated. Hoover interpreted the Communist
Control Act as giving the FBI brought authority to investigate
and proactively disrupt communist threats in the US, and when
the Bureau started these counterintelligence programs, at first the focus
was on communism. The first formal co intel pro built

(15:28):
on ongoing counterintelligence efforts that targeted communists. It was called
co Intel pro Communist Party USA or CPUSA, and that
was launched in nineteen fifty six. This formal co Intel
pro grew out of a series of field conferences that
were held that year as suspected communists had been brought

(15:49):
to trial under the Smith Act. The FBI's informants from
within the Communist Party had been exposed when they were
brought in to testify in court. These field conference were
held in part to figure out how the Bureau could
recruit new informants. A counterintelligence program was recommended as a
way to keep targeting communists while recruiting new informants. Shortly

(16:12):
after the FBI established cointel pro Communist Party USA. The
US Supreme Court partially reversed its earlier decision in Dennis
versus the United States. This time the decision was in
Yates v. United States. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice
Earl Warren, ruled that radical reactionary speech was protected under

(16:32):
the First Amendment. People could talk about revolution and overthrowing
the government in the abstract, and that was protected speech
unless it posed a clear and present danger. This overturned
the convictions of fourteen people who had been charged with
violating the Smith Act. On the same day, the Supreme
Court also issued to other decisions in cases involving communism

(16:55):
and members of the Communist Party, and both cases protected
their rights to things like price to see and due process.
These Supreme Court decisions were the first of a series
that overturned or narrowed the focus of laws that had
been providing the foundation for the FBI's activities against suspected communists.
The FBI argued that these court rulings left them with

(17:17):
no other choice but to fight communism through covert counterintelligence,
so by the time the cointel pros were uncovered and investigated,
more than half of all the proposed operations had been
aimed at the Communist Party USA. The FBI carried out
one thousand, three hundred eighty eight separate documented efforts against

(17:37):
the Communist Party, whose membership went from twenty two thousand
in the early nineteen fifties to three thousand by nineteen
fifty seven. But the focus expanded out from communism. Co
intel pro CPUSA targeted communists and suspected communists, and then
organizations that had Communists among their members, and then organizations

(17:59):
that were made be tangentially connected to suspected communists, and
then organizations whose purpose and goals had some common themes
with the Communist Party even if there were no Communists involved,
and then the definition of communism expanded to include pretty
much anything that the Bureau considered to be subversive. Co

(18:20):
Intel pro Cposa also included counterintelligence operations against civil rights activists,
initially because of known or suspected ties to communism. For example,
Stanley David Levison was a friend and advisor to Martin
Luther King Junior, and he had also been one of
the major financiers of the Communist Party USA. But this

(18:42):
targeting of civil rights activists was not just about actual
connections to communism. It was also because the Bureau saw
civil rights work in the US in general as a
subversive threat. So as cointel pro Cposa expanded, the FBI
put intense efforts into discrediting and disrupting civil rights organizations.

(19:03):
The FBI repeatedly broke into civil rights organization's offices to
steal documents, and got the IRS to start spurious audits
of civil rights leaders. In nineteen sixty four, the FBI
sent an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King Junior, supposedly
written by an anonymous black person, calling him quote a
colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that This

(19:27):
letter was accompanied by an audio recording purportedly documenting evidence
of King's extramarital affairs. It ended by saying that there
was quote only one thing left for you to do.
The implication was that King should take his own life,
and it said he had thirty four days to do it,
that deadline being the day he was due to accept

(19:48):
the Nobel Peace Prize. So those are just examples of
the targeting of civil rights groups. And as the focus
of co intel pro CPUSA expanded, the Bureau also started
establishing other separate counterintelligence programs. When a Senate committee investigated
the US government's intelligence operations starting in nineteen seventy five,

(20:08):
we're going to talk about that in Part two. They
found five specific named FBI co intel pros, including co
intel pro Communist Party USA. The next co intel pro
Socialist Workers Party started in nineteen sixty one. This one
was short lived. There's a whole bunch of freedom of
information acts stuff on the FBI website, and this one

(20:30):
only has like three pages or three lengths of stuff
to go through, like the other ones have sometimes twenty
and thirty and multiple pages of links to go through.
So we're not covering that one in as much detail.
But one of the things that the Bureau routinely did
was to target Socialist Workers Party members who were running
for public office to undermine their political campaigns. In nineteen

(20:53):
sixty four, the bureau launched co Intel pro White Hate,
co Intel pro Black Nationalist Slash Hate groups started in
nineteen sixty seven, and co Intel pro New Left started
in nineteen sixty eight. Other counterintelligence programs were also unearthed
later on, with targets that included the American Indian Movement
and Puerto Rican independence activists. Ostensibly, the goals of all

(21:17):
these counterintelligence programs were to protect national security and to
prevent violence, and to do that the FBI would quote expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit,
or otherwise neutralize its targets. The one exception was co
Intel pro White Hate, and with that the FBI was
focused on curbing white nationalist violence rather than neutralizing the

(21:41):
targeted groups altogether, which was more the focus and the
other coin cel pros we're going to get to more
about that in a bit. At the same time, even
though the FBI was purportedly preventing violence, some of these
operations incited violence. For example, the FBI tried to start
or escalate violent disputes between the black Panthers and street

(22:02):
gangs operating in the same areas. As another example, it's
not clear whether the FBI played a direct part in
the assassination of Malcolm X, but the Bureau definitely stoked
the divisions and disputes within the Nation of Islam that
led to his assassination. Another Bureau effort that was unearthed
later was Operation Hoodwink, which was an effort to quote

(22:25):
evoke a dispute between CPUSA and Lekosa Nostra, in other words,
to try to start a war between the Communist Party
and the Sicilian mafia. And beyond these ideas of national
security and violence prevention, these programs also worked to maintain
the existing social and political order in the United States.

(22:45):
These co intail pros, many of them targeted organizations that
were not violent and did not threaten national security, but
they did advocate for changes big and small in how
the country operated or treated its residents and citizens, especially
with and people of color. Although there was some variation
from one to another, which we will get into, the

(23:06):
Bureau tended to use similar tactics all across all of
these various counterintelligence programs. Most of these tactics came from
counterintelligence works that had been carried out in foreign countries
during wartime, with outcomes that the FBI considered to be successful.
In other words, the United States had honed these techniques
against its enemies during wartime, and then the FBI started

(23:29):
using them in the US against its own citizens. To
quote the Church Committee report, which followed a Senate investigation
into US intelligence activities. Quote, the techniques were adopted wholesale
from wartime counter intelligence and ranged from the trivial mailing
reprints of reader's digest articles to college administrators to the

(23:49):
degrading sending anonymous poison pen letters intending to break up marriages,
and the dangerous encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members
of violent groups as police informers. So the bureau relied
on informants, surveillance, and other investigative tools to get information
about organizations, their activities, and their members. This included everything

(24:13):
from conducting interviews, to opening and photocopying people's mail, to
breaking into organization's offices to tap phones and copy documents.
Then it used that information to create division, distrust, and dissent.
Sometimes the interviews themselves did that work, interviewing members of
an organization to make others suspect they were informants, or

(24:36):
conducting multiple simultaneous interviews to make people think that their
organization had been infiltrated. One specific tactic used to breed
distrust was called snitch jacketing, also known as bad jacketing,
which involved using things like planted evidence and faked communications
to make it seem like a loyal member of an
organization was really an FBI informant. In some cases, FBI

(24:59):
informed planted the suspicion that loyal members were informants to
shift the focus off of themselves, and the FBI used
this tactic within organizations that had a reputation for violence,
as mentioned earlier, even though that carried the real potential
for the targeted member to be assassinated or otherwise harmed.
The Bureau also called people's parents, employers, landlords, and universities

(25:23):
to inform them of their involvement in targeted organizations to
try to get them fired, evicted, or expelled. Many of
the targets of cointel pro New Left were college students,
and the FBI either contacted their parents to tell them
about their children's purportedly subversive activities or they faked calls
from parents to students haranguing them for their political activity.

(25:46):
The FBI also created and distributed published material that was
meant to discredit their targets, and they fed news stories,
sometimes real and sometimes fabricated, to the media. FBI informants
gave media interviews in which they intentionally tried to make
the organizations they were purportedly representing look as bad as possible,

(26:07):
whether it was through using loaded rhetoric or emphasizing a
group's most controversial viewpoints, or just seeming unhinged. The FBI
also paid informants to make false statements, for example, paying
informants who were part of nonviolent organizations to make public
calls for violence. In some cases, the bureau even set

(26:27):
up local branches of an organization, with the branch's entire
membership being made up completely of informants, or they set
up new fictitious organizations whose members were all informants so
that they could work against their actual targets. The FBI
also outed gay people and spread rumors about people's sexual orientations,

(26:48):
regardless of what their sexual orientation actually was. They made
postcards and mailed them to people's homes like for example,
a card that said quote thank you for your successful
anticipation in anti establishment and anti military Industrial complex activities,
and those were sent to college students' parental addresses. During

(27:09):
co Intel pro New Left, the Bureau used postcards specifically
so that mail carriers, other members of a target's household,
and others could also see the messaging, and so the
intended target would wonder who else might have seen it.
Although most of these tactics were used across all the
different counterintelligence programs, they weren't used identically or to the

(27:31):
same extent from one to another. For example, the FBI
didn't really create a lot of false documents to drive
negative publicity for the ku Klux Klan under Cointel pro
White Hate. It didn't really need to, since the Ku
Klux Klan's activities included openly harassing and murdering civil rights activists.
As another example, the FBI also used tactics that had

(27:53):
the potential to cause really serious physical, emotional, or economic
harm during co Intel prob Bloe nationalist hate groups, but
really rarely used similar tactics when they were working in
co Intel pro White Hate. Although the FBI was fairly
insulated from other government departments, which is how it was
able to carry out these kinds of programs for so long.

(28:16):
It also pulled in other departments and bureaus. As part
of this work. The FBI leaked real and false information
to the IRS, prompting audits of civil rights leaders and
other targets, essentially using the IRS to harass people. It
did the same with local police, leading to things like
police harassment, arrests, false charges, and just a selective enforcement

(28:39):
of existing laws depending on who the FBI thought deserved
to be prosecuted. Basically, all these efforts combined investigation, disinformation,
psychological warfare, and harassment to try to destroy organizations that
the FBI thought were threatening, or, in the case of
cointel pro white hate, to just try to curb those
organizations violence rather than trying to neutralize them altogether. In

(29:03):
all of this, the FBI's focus was on whether what
it was doing was effective, not on whether these tactics
were constitutional or otherwise legal. According to the FBI, co
intel pro operations were a tiny proportion of its overall
work between nineteen fifty six and nineteen seventy one, quote
about two tenths of one percent of the FBI's workload

(29:25):
over a fifteen year period. At the same time, more
than fifty thousand pages of co intel pro documents were
released to the public. Starting in the nineteen seventies, a
Senate investigation concluded that the FBI had carried out two thousand,
three hundred seventy separate counterintelligence actions, with almost one thousand
additional actions being proposed but not carried out. More were unearthed.

(29:49):
Later on, we're going to talk about coin cell pro
white hate, which, as we've noted, is kind of an
outlier in all of this. After a quick sponsor break,
the FBI established most of its co intel pros because

(30:10):
it believed that the people and organizations that it was
targeting were a threat. Overwhelmingly, these targets were on the
political left. They were people and groups who were advocating
for things like civil rights, black liberation, women's liberation, pacifism, socialism, communism,
nuclear disarmament, and an end to the US involvement in

(30:30):
the Vietnam War. Things like that. As we noted at
the top of the show, there were exceptions, but most
of the time the people and organizations being targeted weren't
violent threats. Even organizations that weren't specifically nonviolent. A lot
of the time were focused on defending themselves with violence
if necessary, not on instigating violence, or in some cases,

(30:51):
there were individual members of an organization that were involved
in violence while the organization itself was not. Co Intel
pro White Hate started on July thirtieth, nineteen sixty four,
and in many ways it was an outlier when compared
to the other co Intel pros. Most of the other
programs shifted and expanded over time, and some of them

(31:11):
were particularly vague. For example, in co Intel pro New Left,
the FBI did not have a precise definition for what
New Left even meant. But co Intel pro White Hate
was focused on white supremacist groups, especially the Ku Klux Klan,
and it kept that focus throughout its whole existence. The
Ku Klux Klan has been through a few iterations in

(31:33):
the United States, and it surged in popularity during the
Civil Rights movement, with its members fighting against integration and
terrorizing black people in other communities, using everything from cross
burnings to murder. Co Intel pro White Hate targeted seventeen
Ku Klux Klan organizations and nine other hate groups, including

(31:53):
the American Nazi Party. Another big difference is that many
of the other co intel pros were focused on organizations
that were challenging the status quo. The Ku Klux Klan
and other targeted hate groups, on the other hand, were
maintaining the status quo by upholding segregation, racism, and white supremacy.
They harassed, threatened, and murdered integrationists and civil rights workers,

(32:16):
primarily in the Southern United States. In general, members of
these organizations were also Christian, anti communists, intensely patriotic, and
supportive of both local and federal law enforcement. So, unlike
with the other co intel pros, the FBI's goal wasn't
to totally neutralize these groups. It was just to curb

(32:37):
their violence and prevent that violence from spreading to other groups.
The FBI also took the initiative to launch its other
co intel pros based on its own assessments of what
constituted a threat, But co intel pro white hate followed
intense pressure from outside the bureau, including from President Lyndon
Baines Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Current and

(33:00):
former klansmen and other white supremacists had carried out a
whole series of murders and other acts of violence. This
included the nineteen sixty three Sixteenth Street Baptist church bonding,
which killed fourteen year olds Addie mccollins, Denise McNair and
Carol Robertson and eleven year old Cynthia Wesley. It also
included the nineteen sixty three murder of Medgar Evers and

(33:23):
the nineteen sixty four murders of civil rights activists Michael Schwermer,
Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney. After coinceel pro white hate started,
members of the clan also murdered Viola Luzo, and one
of the participants in that murder might have been a
paid FBI informant. The FBI was criticized for failing to
prevent or intervene in any of this, something that the

(33:45):
Bureau had argued was not part of its jurisdiction, but
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four had guaranteed
black Americans equal protection under the law in a number
of different contexts, which made it hard for the FBI
to continue that argument. Cointel pro white hate then served
several purposes for the FBI. It allowed the bureau to

(34:05):
demonstrate for the President and the Attorney General that it
was doing something to investigate these crimes. At the same time,
by using covert counterintelligence, the FBI could do most of
this work in secret without alienating or antagonizing Southern law enforcement,
many of whom tacitly allowed the Ku Klux Klan and
other hate groups to operate in their area or actively participated.

(34:29):
As a side note, when j Edgar Hoover said quote
doctor Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in
the country in nineteen sixty four, that was in response
to King's criticisms that the Bureau was too friendly with
Southern segregationists and that the Southern FBI agents were not
taking threats to Black Americans seriously. The FBI used a

(34:51):
lot of the types of tactics that we discussed earlier
in the episode during cointel pro white hate. As we
noted earlier, the Bureau didn't really need to create materials
to try to bring bad pr to the clan because
the clan was doing a lot of that work for them.
The FBI publicized not only their hate crimes, but also
other crimes committed by clan leaders and members, including things

(35:13):
like embezzlement and attempting to arrange marriages between clan members
and underage girls. The FBI also publicly identified clan leaders,
including leaking their names to the press who published critical
articles and satirical editorial cartoons. After the House on American
Activities Committee held hearings on the clan, something that the

(35:34):
committee was pressured to take on, the FBI released those
findings to the press as well. The FBI also worked
to so distrust within these organizations. They sent thousands of
postcards to clan members that either implied or flat out
said that the government had infiltrated the organization or that
accused KKK leaders of fraud or other wrongdoing. These postcards

(35:58):
said things like clansmen, trying to hide your identity behind
your sheet? You received this, someone knows who you are.
Once again, these postcards served multiple purposes to make clan
members think the organization had been infiltrated, to make them
wonder how many other people had seen that postcard on
its way to them, and to make it possible for

(36:18):
other people, including postal workers, to see that the target
was in the clan. During coen Cel pro White Hate,
the Bureau created the National Committee for Domestic Tranquility, which
sent letters and other materials to clan members to stoke
dissent and spread rumors about informants. They printed accusations that
clan leaders were the anti Christ and kind of a

(36:41):
weird irony. The FBI, which is we've talked about, was
really focused on undermining communism, tried to undermine clan membership
by spreading rumors that communists had infiltrated the organizations. The
organization itself was fiercely anti communist. Some of the operations
were almost bizarre. In one instance, the FBI collected the

(37:04):
charred remnants of a cross that the clan had burned
and then had it delivered by courier to a clan meeting,
hoping to reinforce the idea that not only had someone
known about the cross burning and who was behind it,
but that they also knew when and where the group gathered.
It is not clear how effective this was. According to

(37:25):
the book that I was reading about this, they took
it outside and tried to light it on fire again.
The targeted hate groups naturally realized that they had informants
in their midst Some turned toward requiring lie detector tests
and questioning people under the effects of sodium pentathal to
try to determine whether a person was loyal. It is

(37:45):
not clear whether co Intel pro white hate thwarted white
supremacist violence, but overall membership in the clan did drop
during these years, from an estimated fourteen to fifteen thousand
members before co Intel pro tour twey three hundred in
nineteen seventy one. It does also seem that public perceptions

(38:05):
of the clan shifted during these same years, with more people,
especially more white people, seeing the clan in similar hate groups,
as violent and unstable and mentally connecting the clan to Nazis.
Some white Southern leaders who had tacitly or directly approved
of the clan's activities gradually distanced themselves during the Bureaus operations.

(38:28):
So in the next episode, we're going to talk more
about some of the other Cohentel pros, including intense targeting
of the Black Panthers, and we'll also talk about, honestly
one of my favorite parts of this whole story, which
is how these programs were finally exposed. That is a
very very good story. Thanks so much for joining us

(38:51):
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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