July 22, 2020 • 44 mins
In part two of this topic, the show looks at some of the specifics of the COINTELPROs that targeted black liberation organizations and the New Left, as well as how these programs were finally exposed to the public.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are wrapping up our two parter on Cohen's Hell Pro
including it's targeting of so called black nationalist slash hate
(00:25):
groups UM and a targeting of a very vaguely defined
movement known as the New Left. To briefly recap from
part one, which is highly recommended before listening to this
because it includes a lot of context and overview, But
just as a quick recap, we're gonna quote from the
Church Report, which followed more than a year of Senate
(00:46):
Committee hearings into all this quote, the origins of Cohen's
Hell pro demonstrate that the Bureau adopted extra legal methods
to counter perceived threats to national security and public order
because the ordinary legal processes were believed to be insufficient
to do the job. In essence, the Bureau took the
law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation
(01:11):
against domestic enemies. Whether those targets were really enemies, though,
that is a different question. The report went on to say,
quote the choice of individuals and organizations to be neutralized
and disrupted ranged from the violent elements of the Black
Panther Party to Martin Luther King Jr. Who the Bureau
concedes was an advocate of non violence, from the Communist
(01:33):
Party to the Ku Klux Klan, from the advocates of
violent revolutions such as the Weatherman, to the supporters of
peaceful social change, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
the Inter University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy. Just
a heads up in this episode, there are going to
be some discussions of suicide and also police violence. In
(01:54):
nineteen sixty seven, the FBI started co Intel pro Black
Nationalist hate groups. For the most part, targeting of civil
rights groups that had been carried out under co Intel
pro CPUSA, which we talked about last time, rolled up
under this newly established program. In the words of the
program supervisor, the targeted groups were selected because they were
(02:16):
believed to be violent or because of their quote radical
or revolutionary rhetoric and actions. On March four, FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover sent a memo to be routed through
forty one FBI field offices. This memo was called counterintelligence program,
black nationalist hate groups, racial intelligence. And this is a
(02:38):
little bit long, but it's so illustrative of what the
FBI was doing here and more generally, what Hoover's mindset
was across the other co intel pros. We're going to
read a chunk of it. So it began quote goals
for maximum effectiveness of the counterintelligence program and to prevent
wasted effort. Long range goals are being set. Number one,
(03:01):
prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity,
there is strength, a truism that is no less valid
for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist
groups might be the first step toward a real mau
Mau in America, the beginning of a true Black revolution. So,
for context, mau Mau is a reference to the Mau
(03:22):
Mao movement and uprising in Kenya, which advocated a violent
overthrow of British colonial rule. This went on to prevent
the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify
the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been
such a messiah. He is the martyr of the movement today.
(03:42):
Martin Luther King stokely. Carmichael and Elijah Mohammed all aspire
to this position. Elijah Mohammed is less of a threat
because of his age, King could be a very real
contender for this position should he abandon his supposed quote
obedience to quote white liberal doctrines and at sees nonviolence
and embrace Black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to
(04:06):
be a real threat in this way. Number three prevent
violence on the part of black nationalist groups. This is
of primary importance and is of course a goal of
our investigative activity. It should also be a goal of
the counter intelligence program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize
them before they exercise their potential for violence. Number four
(04:30):
prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability
by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community.
The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically
in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals
to first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be
(04:51):
discredited to the white community. Both the responsible community and
to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black
nationalist Simply because they are negroes. Third, these groups must
be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals the followers
of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics
(05:12):
from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical
statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group. It
adds respectability in a different way. Number five. A final
goal should be to prevent the long range growth of
militant black organizations, especially among youths. Specific tactics to prevent
(05:33):
these groups from converting young people must be developed. This
memo went on to outline the primary targets of this
Cohen's help pro that everything we just read was going
to apply to These were the organizations that Hoover described
as the quote most violent and radical. It included the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
(05:58):
Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Nation of Islam. This is
an incredibly weird list. Snake has non violent right into
the name, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther
King Jr. Helped found this represents the whole spectrum of
from non violent direct action to revolutionary Black nationalism, and
(06:23):
the FBI even noted that in its view, some individual
members of the Nation of Islam had been involved in violence,
but the organization itself was not violent. It was being
targeted because of its separatism. Basically, the FBI grouped a
lot of different organizations with a wide range of objectives
and ideologies and tactics under this co intel pro that
(06:44):
was supposedly about black nationalism and hate groups. Some, as
Tracy just mentioned, were strictly pacifist, Some advocated gun ownership
or violent self defense, Some spoke in very theoretical terms
about the need for a revolution, and some of them
called for an actual armed uprising or other violence. All
(07:06):
very different ideologies, but still under this one umbrella. The
FBI classed them all together as violent and radical, viewing
virtually any organization calling for equal rights for black people
as potentially violent and as a consequence, as needing to
be disrupted. Yeah. Like, the thing that that these all
had in common was like black people say quality equality please,
(07:29):
or like demanding equality with very aggressive rhetoric and sometimes violence. Like,
that's what it all had in common. The FBI put
intense effort into discrediting and disrupting all these organizations and
other organizations that were not specifically named using all the
methods that we talked about in Part one. But about
a year after this Coin's Hell Pro was established, another
different organization rose to national prominence, and that was the
(07:52):
Black Panther Party, and this Coin's Hell Pro then pivoted
to shift almost exclusively on that. The Black Panther Party,
originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, was
founded in Oakland, California, in nineteen sixty six by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seal. A lot of the Black Panthers
rhetoric was radical and revolutionary, arguing that the only way
(08:14):
black people could be truly free is if they were
able to govern their own affairs. When they were establishing
the party, Newton and Seal crafted a ten point program
which began, we want freedom, We want power to determine
the destiny of our black community. This ten point program
went on to call for full employment, an end to
(08:35):
quote the robbery by the capitalists of our black community,
decent housing, education, exemption from military service for black men,
an end to police brutality, freedom for black men who
were held in prisons and jails, and it ended quote
we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.
(08:55):
The Ten Point Plan elaborated on each of these points.
The eemption from military service stemmed from the United States
involvement in Vietnam and the idea that black people should
not be forced to serve in the military of a
nation that did not protect them. The idea behind the
release of incarcerated black men was that they had not
been given a fair and impartial trial, so their convictions
(09:18):
were not valid. As part of their work, the Black
Panthers started more than thirty community service programs known as
survival programs. These included things like free breakfast programs for
school children, a tuberculosis screening and treatment program, medical clinics,
ambulance services, legal aid, and education programs. The Black Panthers
(09:39):
also created a screening program for sickle cell disease that
later served as a template for the federal government's own
screening programs. Over time, a lot of these services were
expanded to include anyone who was oppressed, including poor white people.
The Black Panthers also showed up to support other marginalized
groups in their own activism. They are meant in two
(10:00):
different times in our Six Impossible episodes, from Sippins to
fish Ins, which focused on direct action demonstrations and similar protests.
In that episode, we talked about the Black Panthers support
of the fish In movement in the Pacific Northwest, and
they're providing meals to disabled activists who took over the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare office in San Francisco
(10:23):
during the Section five oh four protests. But today, the
first thing a lot of people, especially a lot of
white people, think of when someone says the Black Panthers
is guns and violence. The Black Panthers organized armed patrols
of black neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality and
from gang violence. At one point, they staged an armed
(10:43):
takeover of the California State Legislature that was in response
to gun control legislation. As other examples outside of the
party's organized activities, Huie Newton was involved in a shootout
with police in nineteen sixty seven in which an officer
was killed. Bobby Seal was charged but not convicted, with
conspiracy to incite riots at the nineteen sixty eight Democratic
(11:04):
National Convention and of the murder of a nineteen year
old Black Panther who was suspected of being a police
informant in a memo back to headquarters. A California field
office described the Black Panthers as quote the most violence
prone organization of all the extremist groups now operating in
the United States, and that alleged that they were performing
(11:24):
quote not only verbal attacks but also physical attacks on police. Later,
j Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers quote one of
the greatest threats to the nation's internal security. On November night,
several FBI field offices received a memo ordering them to
submit quote imaginative and hard hitting counter intelligence measures aimed
(11:47):
at crippling the BPP, of course, the Black Panther Party.
This directive was expanded to additional field offices in January
of nineteen sixty nine. Kellen's held pro black nationalist hate
groups soon focused almost entirely on the Black Panthers, rather
than on that collection of groups that we outlined earlier
in that nine eight memo of this co intell prose,
(12:09):
two documented actions, two hundred thirty three of them were
against the Black Panthers, using all those various techniques that
we described in Part one as examples, the FBI intentionally
undermined the Black Panthers public service programs, for example, by
sending fake, inflammatory membership materials to food pantries and other
(12:30):
organizations that were donating food for the breakfast programs. The
Bureau used disinformation to try to spark violent conflicts between
the Panthers an area street gangs, and to spark violent
conflicts between the Panthers and police to reinforce the idea
that the Black Panthers were just inherently violent. In nineteen
sixty nine, the FBI became aware of a Black Panther
(12:54):
coloring book. The origins of this book are a little
bit marky, but I can find a Cambone, who was
then known as Mark Teamer, has taken credit for its creation,
and in interview he describes it as a history book.
It depicts slave owners, greedy store owners, and police all
as obese pigs with exaggerated lower tusks. While Cambone has
(13:19):
stressed that these pigs can be any color, which is
why it is a coloring book, they are generally interpreted
as representations of white people, and this book is full
of images of black people, adults and children, men and
women stabbing and shooting the pigs. Black Panther leadership felt
that the coloring book was inappropriate and ordered Cambone to
(13:41):
destroy it, but someone made copies, and after the FBI
obtained one, it made more copies and distributed them as
though the Black Panther Party had officially created this book
with the intent of distributing it to children. The FBI
has harassment of the Black Panthers also went beyond the
organization's membership and its programs. Jean Seeberg was an actress
(14:03):
who donated to the Black Panthers and support of their
breakfast programs. During her pregnancy, the FBI sent false tips
to news organizations alleging that the father of her baby
was a Black Panther. This, of course, was a huge scandal.
Seeberg tried to take her own life. As a result,
she went into labor prematurely and her baby died. According
(14:25):
to family members, she tried to take her own life
every year around the time of the baby's death, and
then she died in nineteen seventy nine. Her death was
ruled a suicide, although some of her families had suspicions
that there was foul play involved, and, perhaps most notoriously,
on December fourth, nineteen sixty nine, the FBI orchestrated a
raid that was carried out by Chicago police, who fired
(14:47):
between eighty two and ninety nine gunshots into an apartment
where several members of the Black Panther Party were sleeping.
Among other involvement, and FBI informant had provided police with
a floor plan of the apartment. Chicago Black Panther leaders
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed and four other
people in the apartment were seriously injured. Police claimed that
(15:10):
this was a violent gunfight, with the Black Panthers being
the first to open fire, but an investigation revealed that
only one shot had been fired from inside the apartment,
most likely by Mark Clark after he had already been
fatally shot by police. According to Hampton's fiance, Debra Johnson,
who was in bed asleep with him when the shooting started,
(15:31):
an officer who came into the apartment after the shooting
stopped asked if Hampton was still alive. Another officer fired
two shots and said he's good and dead now. The
Black Panther Party dissolved in nineteen eight two, with co
intel probe being one of the many factors that contributed
to its end. Former members say it is unrelated to
the New Black Panther Party, which was founded in ninety
(15:54):
nine and is classified as a hate group by the
United States Commission on Civil Rights in the Southern Poverty
Law Center. Let's take a break. The last formal coincal
pro that was described in the Senate investigation reports we're
(16:16):
going to talk about in a little bit was coincal
pro New Left, and that started in and of all
the formally named coincal pros, this was the most loosely focused.
And I mean, as we've discussed, most of them were
loosely focused. As we mentioned in part one, the FBI
didn't really even have a definition for what new Left meant.
(16:38):
The New Left supervisor, who was quoted in the Church
Committee report said quote, I cannot recall any document that
was written defining new Left is such. It is my
impression that the characterization of new Left groups, rather than
being defined at any specific time by document, it more
or less grew. It has never been strictly defined as
(16:59):
far as I know. It is more or less an attitude.
I would think that makes it sound almost like an
advertiser sound bite new Left. It's an attitude. Uh. The
incident that prompted the FBI to create this co Intel.
Pro was a student uprising at Columbia University in ninety
There was a lot involved in this protest, but its
(17:19):
most direct precursor was the university's decision to build a
new gym in Morningside Park. Even though the gym was
being planned for public land, its facilities would mostly be
for use only by the university and not by the public.
To add to that frustration, this was part of an
ongoing pattern of the university's expansion into Harlem, which was
(17:41):
pushing the neighborhoods predominantly black residents out of their homes
in order to build facilities that they were not going
to be allowed to access. So the resulting protest was complicated,
Like we cannot get all into all of the nuances here,
but generally, the university's Student Afro American Society or s
a S started voicing their own and the community's objections
(18:04):
to this gym, and then the school's chapter of the
Students for a Democratic Society or SDS, which was predominantly white,
saw this as an opportunity for a larger protest that
would also focus on the university's involvement with the Vietnam War.
Members of the s a S felt like they were
being talked over and that the SDS was taking the
(18:24):
protests in an entirely different direction. And the end, the
Student Afro American Society took over Hamilton's Hall and the
Students for a Democratic Society took over other buildings on
campus and took the Dean hostage. There were more than
a thousand demonstrators who took part in this campus shutdown
that lasted for a week. At the university's request, the
(18:46):
New York Police Department began clearing the demonstrators on April nine.
Black demonstrators who had taken over Hamilton's Hall left peacefully,
but as more than one thousand police moved into the
other building, some of the other demonstrators verbally and physically resisted,
including by throwing things like shoes, bathroom tiles, and books
(19:08):
at officers. Police forcibly removed people, beating some of the
resisting students and in some cases bystanders with night sticks.
Others were trampled. In the end, one hundred thirty two students,
four faculty members, and twelve police officers were injured. So
co incal pro New Left was motivated by the FBI's
(19:30):
frustrations that the university had not brought in police earlier,
and also by a sense that these types of protests
should not be permitted to happen in the first place.
The directives for coincal pro New Left were distributed by
a memo in May of nineteen eight, and as described
in the Church Report, agents were to gather information on
(19:50):
this is all a quote. One false allegations of police
brutality to quote, counter the widespread charges of police brutality
that invariably arise following student police encounters. Two immorality depicting
the quote scurless and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits,
and living conditions representative of New Left adherents. And three
(20:13):
action by college administrators to quote to show the value
of college administrators and school officials taking a firm stand
and pointing out quote whether and to what extent faculty
members rendered aid and encouragement. Point to sounds like a
lot of the other counterintelligence efforts we've talked about in
co intel pros, but otherwise in the FBI's view, the
(20:38):
use of force against demonstrators was warranted and if demonstrators
were injured in the process, they deserved it. In night,
both the FBI and the NYPD viewed the amount of
force used at Columbia as appropriate and restrained. No tear
gas was used, no one was shot, and the injuries
sustained by students and faculty were minor enough that the
(21:00):
who had to go to the hospital were treated and released.
That's just such such a weird bar, to such a
weird bar of whether their use was appropriate. The use
of forces appropriate was like, well, okay, nobody like died,
was kind of the tone of it. However, the FBI
also had a similar interpretation in cases of police brutality
(21:21):
that we're far more clearly egregious. For example, after riots
broke out during the nine Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
a memo from FBI headquarters to the Chicago Field Office
read quote, once again, the liberal press and the bleeding
hearts and the forces on the left are taking advantage
of the situation in Chicago surrounding the Democratic National Convention
(21:43):
to attack the police and organized law enforcement agencies. We
should be mindful of this situation and develop all possible
evidence to expose this activity and to refute these false allegations. Conversely,
the Walker Report, which was prepared for the National Commission
on the Call Is in Prevention of Violence, concluded that
there really was police wrongdoing a portion of it read quote.
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Demonstrators attacked too, and they posed difficult problems for police
as they persisted in marching through the streets, blocking traffic
and intersections. But it was the police who forced them
out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on
the part of the police, there was enough wild club swinging,
enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the
(22:27):
conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed
violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for
crowd dispersal or arrests. To read dispassionately the hundreds of
statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday
nights is to become convinced of the presence of what
(22:47):
can only be called a police riot. So while coen
falpro New Left was ostensibly about targeting this very vaguely
defined collection of left wing demonstrators as being a threat
to national security, it also paired up with this sense
of a much needed law enforcement crackdown that was justified
and necessary, and the need to protect police and other
(23:10):
law enforcement from false accusations of brutality. Aside from that,
it is difficult to talk about co intel Pro New
Left in a cohesive way. The counter intelligence program wound
up targeting virtually every anti war group in the US,
as well as student demonstrators who were demonstrating for just
about any reason. In the words of the Church Report quote,
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none of the Bureau witnesses deposed believes the New Left
co intel Pro was generally effective, in part because of
the imprecise targeting. Also, the tone of a lot of
the FBI memos regarding the New Left sound almost baffled.
Agents really did not get these young people, most of
them white and affluent, a lot of them looking like
(23:54):
stereotypical hippies agitating against things like police brutality in the
Vietnam War. Memos include kind of perplexed sounding references to
things like yoga and drugs. Participants in the organization's targeted
under co intel Pro. New Left also tended to be
simultaneously idealistic and cynical, so the Bureau had a harder
(24:17):
time finding informants or infiltrating organizations. For example, the main
phone at the national headquarters of Students for a Democratic
Society had a sign taped to it for more than
a year that said, in capital letters, this phone is tapped. Yeah.
That is not to suggest that the other targeted organizations
were clueless, like they were just particularly cynical about the
(24:41):
Bureau by this point. The people who ultimately got the
ball rolling on exposing Cointel pro were members of anti
war and other activist movements that had been targeted during
these programs history, and we'll talk more about that after
a SPONSI break. Counterintelligence is still part of the FBI's work,
(25:08):
but in terms of these formally named Cohen cell prose,
those came to an end thanks to the work of
some regular people who pulled off a heist. When we
say regular people, they included a cab driver, a daycare
center director, a social worker, and a professor. It sounds
like one of those walk into a bar jokes. I know.
(25:28):
It's my favorite part of these episodes for the number
of reasons, one of them being it's the most straightforward. Yeah.
Also it being just kind of a David and Goliath story,
so it have become clear to many of these groups
that the FBI was targeting them. Left wing activists viewed
the FBI with increasing suspicion, but nobody had evidence of
(25:49):
what they thought was happening. In nineteen seventy, a group
of anti war activists in the Philadelphia area decided to
do something about it. Anti war activists and college professor
or William C. David On came up with the idea.
John and Bonnie Raines, a married couple with small children,
were also involved. John had also been a freedom writer.
(26:11):
Others included Keith Forsyth, Robert Williamson, Judy Finegold, and two
people known by pseudonyms. One of those is Susan Smith
and the other is Ron Durst. A ninth participant dropped
out before the burglary actually took place. There was no
way they could break into the Philadelphia FBI office, which
had tight security, so they looked for other FBI field offices,
(26:34):
finding one nearby in Media, Pennsylvania. This office was housed
in an apartment building with a shared lobby space, which
was adjacent to the county courthouse. They cased this area.
Bonnie rains posed as a student from Swarthmore College and
arranged a meeting under the guise of researching career opportunities
(26:55):
for women at the Bureau. They scheduled their burglary for
March eighth, n d one, the night of the Fight
of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier, reasoning
that most people would be watching the fight. After breaking in,
they removed thousands of files which were being stored in
regular file cabinets. After sorting through what they had stolen,
(27:16):
they mailed selections to newspapers and members of Congress, anonymously
calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. Most
of the newspapers returned these documents to the Bureau, but
the Washington Post confirmed their authenticity and ran a front
page story on March ninete. It was titled Stolen Documents
(27:39):
described FBI surveillance activities. The article described surveillance of black
activist organizations and efforts to enhance existing paranoia. To quote
further served to get the point across that there is
an FBI agent behind every mailbox. More mail documents and
more articles followed. J Edgar Hoover officially canceled co Intel
(28:02):
pro on April seven, nineteen seventy one, citing security reasons,
although some co intel pro activities continued just without a
specific name attached, but it wasn't yet clear to anyone
outside the bureau what the term co intel pro meant
or what its scope was. J Edgar Hoover died on
May second, nineteen seventy two. He had been the director
(28:25):
of the FBI for forty eight years. In nineteen seventy
three and nineteen seventy four, NBC journalist Carl Stern filed
a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Those requests were repeatedly turned down until the documents were
finally released under a court order, and that is when
people finally started to get a sense of what co
(28:48):
intel pro meant and just how huge it was. In
nineteen seventy four, Seymour Hirsch wrote a front page article
for The New York Times titled huge CIA operation reported
and US against anti war forces. This article reported that
the CIA was engaged in very Cohen's hell Pro like
(29:08):
operations against peace activists in the US, but the CIA
was not supposed to be operating domestically at all. These
news reports sparked outrage within the government and among the
general public. President Gerald Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission to
investigate the CIA. The House established the Pike Committee to
(29:30):
investigate illegal activities by the CIA, the FBI, and the
n s A. The Pike Committee's report was never published.
On January one, nineteen seventy five, a resolution was introduced
in the Senate to create a committee to investigate federal
intelligence operations and determined quote the extent, if any, to
which illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by
(29:54):
any agency of the federal government. Congressional hearings went on
through five in nineteen seventy six. Senate committee was dubbed
the Church Committee, was headed by Senator Frank Church, a
Democrat from Ohio. The other committee members were selected to
represent a range of viewpoints and experience levels, with the
final group including six Democrats and five Republicans. A staff
(30:17):
of a hundred and fifty people went through the thousands
and thousands of pages of documents that were involved in
all this. We should take a moment to talk about
the FBI documentation. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was
intensely bureaucratic, with a relentless focus on documenting everything. Also,
most of co Intel pros existence took place before the
(30:40):
Freedom of Information Act was passed in nineteen sixty seven.
All of it took place before the Privacy Act amendments
were added in nineteen seventy four, which gave citizens the
right to see the FBI's files about themselves. In other words,
the FBI was writing everything down, and it was not
doing so with the thought that anyone might ever read
(31:01):
any of this outside of the bureau. Whether the information
flow was going out to field offices and agents or
back into headquarters, nobody was disguising their meeting or intent.
Everyone was saying the quiet part loud and doing it
in writing. Also, FBI documents from the co intel pro
era are full of racist slurs and offensive stereotypes of
(31:23):
black people. After the FBI formally started co intel pro
black nationalist slash hate groups, agents talked candidly about how
if they didn't do a good enough job, the Bureau
was going to be forced to hire black agents. This
idea even came with its own slogan that mimicked the
accent of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a rhyming couplet
(31:46):
that ended with the N word, and also as a
continuation of that note. There were only five black FBI
agents during most of the co Intel pro era. They
had been hired as personal assistants or drivers for j.
Edgar Hoover. Then they had been given the title special
agent during World War Two so that they would not
be drafted. So back to the investigations. Most of the
(32:07):
hearings were behind closed doors, both to try to prevent
them from turning into a TV spectacle and also to
protect information about the US methods for conducting intelligence work.
Even so, the hearings were criticized for threatening US intelligence efforts,
and Senator Church was accused of using it to bolster
a presidential bid. While the Church Committee wanted to protect
(32:29):
legitimate US intelligence efforts, it also wanted the public to
have a chance to learn about what was going on,
and to that end, the committee held public hearings in
September and October of nine. These hearings were focused on
specific areas of misconduct. Has included information about a biological
agents program run by the CIA, a domestic surveillance program
(32:53):
from the White House, and the FBI's programs to disrupt
the civil rights movement and the anti Vietnam War movement.
After one hundred twenty six full committee meetings, forty subcommittee meetings,
more than eight hundred witness interviews, and a review of
more than one hundred ten thousand documents, the Church Committee
issued a report that described quote a pattern of reckless
(33:15):
disregard of activities that threatened our constitutional system. And this
was not just unique to the FBI, but the FBI
is our focus here. The report went on to say, quote.
The abusive techniques used by the FBI and Cointel pro
from nineteen fifty six to nineteen seventy one included violations
of both federal and state statutes prohibiting mail fraud, wire fraud,
(33:39):
incitements of violence, sending obscene material through the mail, and extortion.
More fundamentally, the harassment of innocent citizens engaged in lawful
forms of political expression did serious injury to the First
Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and the right of
the people to assemble peaceably and to position the government
(33:59):
for redress of grievances. The report also made it clear
that the national security and violence prevention concerns were not
the FBI's only motivation. Quote. The unexpressed major premise of
the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the
duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats
(34:20):
to the existing social and political order. Eight percent of
the approved co intel pro proposals targeted speakers, teachers, writers,
or publications, meetings, and peaceful demonstrations, all of which were
just exercising a constitutional right to free speech. Operations tried
to stop lawful speakers from speaking, teachers from teaching, writers
(34:44):
from writing, and demonstrators from demonstrating. The Senate Committee made
nineties six recommendations to quote place intelligence activities within the
Constitutional Scheme for controlling government power. This included changes to
how the FBI was that included a ten year term
limit for the Director of the Bureau. It also included
(35:06):
recommendations for additional oversight within the bureau. Every counter intelligence
proposal had to be approved by headquarters, but outside the
Bureau the programs were almost completely unknown. Specific elements of
co intel pro CPUSA and White Hate were both known
to various Attorneys General, presidential advisers, and Cabinet and committee members.
(35:28):
For example, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the bureau's
wire taps of Martin Luther King Jr. The Bureau also
notified multiple Attorneys General of various accomplishments and progress. Those
are their words against the Ku Klux Klan, without describing
the breadth of what had led to that progress. Even
with these two programs, though the full scope wasn't known
(35:51):
outside the bureau, and it appears that the other co
intel pros weren't known to anyone outside the FBI at all.
Efforts to bring in more over site of the bureau's
activities included the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of nineteen seventy eight.
The exposure of Cointelpro and the hearings that followed drastically
affected mainstream American perceptions of the FBI. According to Gallup polls,
(36:16):
the proportion of Americans with a highly favorable view of
the FBI dropped from eighty four percent in nineteen sixty
five to thirty seven in nineteen seventy five. At the
same time, no criminal convictions followed the investigations and the
Church report, even though that report detailed numerous instances of
(36:36):
criminal activity. As we said, the FBI is still engaged
in counter intelligence. In the years just after Cointel Pro
was disbanded, the FBI did extensive counter intelligence work against
the American Indian Movement and the Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador. This included a disinformation campaign
during the nineteen seventies three occupation of Wounded Knee, both
(37:00):
to discredit the American Indian Movement to the general public
and to try to create division within that occupation. Co
Intel pro has also made headlines at numerous points since
the mid seventies, comparing it to policies and programs that
have been introduced during multiple presidential administrations. This includes comparisons
to various aspects of the Patriot Act and the n
(37:23):
says warrantless surveillance programs in the two thousands. The general
focus on black liberation as somehow inherently threatening and violent
has also continued to be part of the FBI's rhetoric.
In eighteen, leaked documents revealed that the FBI had targeted
Black identity extremists as a major threat, with really similar
(37:45):
language about potential violence to what was used during co
Intel pro Quote. The FBI assesses it is very likely
black identity extremist b i E Perceptions of police brutality
against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory lethal
violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as
(38:06):
justification for such violence. This was paired with criticisms that
the FBI and other federal agencies were ignoring credible threats
of white nationalist violence. Yeah, this is basically a very
similar protests to what has been going on in the
last few months. As we're recording this, which is on
July seven, with demonstrators basically saying please stop shooting unarmed
(38:31):
black people, and the FBI creating this this uh category
of black identity extremists led people to go that's not
a thing though. Made that up To circle back around
to the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, none of
them were ever prosecuted in connection with this break in
(38:52):
and media Pennsylvania. It is possible that law enforcement believe
that the culprits went on to be involved with a
different group of anti Vietnam War activists who were known
as the Camden This group broke into the Camden, New
Jersey Draft Board office and they destroyed draft records there.
The Camden twenty eight were acquitted. Two of the Citizens
(39:14):
Commission to Investigate the FBI actually were involved in that.
So there's some speculation that law enforcement was like, well,
they've already been tried and acquitted of this other thing.
We probably have no chance. Regardless, though several members of
the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI came forward in
their story is told in the book The Burglary The
(39:35):
Discovery of Jed your Hoover's Secret FBI by Betty Medsker,
who also wrote that front page Washington Post story that
we mentioned earlier on. I have not read that book,
but I have watched the documentary N One, which also
tells that story's cotel pro I know it was a lot.
(39:58):
Uh D have listener mail to take us out, hopefully
on a peppyard No man. It kind of is um.
This is an email from Allison, I wrote back to Alison,
but I thought other people might also find it helpful.
Allison was writing about the behind the scenes where Holly
and I talked about encountering racism out in the world
(40:20):
and whether we were prepared to counter it, and so
Allison wrote high on today is behind the scenes, Mini Tracy.
I heard you say you have a response at the
ready for when you hear someone say something racist. I'd
love to hear what you would say, or at least
in generalization, because I'm terrible with on the spot responses
and terribly regret and think back on my lack of
(40:41):
response or retort. I'd love to hear your at the
ready so I might be able to have it in
mind and practice, so I can be ready if or
when that should arise in the future. I hope and
wish it would never happen and I'd never have to
hear anything as such. It's just horrible. I love what
you both do and never miss an episode. Thanks very much, Allison.
So a thing that I am prepared to say, Like,
(41:02):
let's say I'm at the grocery store and the line
is moving really slowly, which it probably is right now,
and somebody behind me implies that it's because the person
running the cash register is incompetent because of their race.
I might say, I hope you're not saying that to
me because you think I agree with you. I first
(41:22):
heard that on a podcast. I'm pretty sure it was
on an episode of Politically Reactive towards the end of
its run, but I'm not actually sure. And like that
is when I want to make it clear to that
person that that's not acceptable the thing that they just said.
But I'm also like not wanting to start a fight
with that person that's a stranger in public. UM. If
I'm talking to a family member and the family member
(41:45):
says something that is is racist on some level, I
might say, I don't understand what you mean by that?
Could you explain it to me? Um? And then a
lot of times that, like, as a person is talking,
they will hear the words they are saying. UM. A
good resource I I have found is if you google
(42:06):
responding to Everyday Bigotry, the first or second result should
be a pamphlet that was published by the Southern Poverty
Law Center that combines a lot of like real world,
anonymous examples of when people have encountered bigotry in their
everyday lives and like practical responses to that. UM. I
(42:27):
like that it's a publication that's been around for a while,
it doesn't cover every conceivable thing, and it is based
on people's personal experiences. UM. But if you're like I
don't I don't know what I should say when something happens,
like that can be a good starting point for folks. UM.
So you're so much more thoughtful because I can read
all of that, but in the moment, what I say
(42:49):
is you're a racist expletive, as probably evidenced by my
story about where I wanted to punch a stranger in public.
So um yeah, uh yeah, I And and that that
applies to family members as well. Somebody tweeted at us
about that story that you had told about being in
(43:09):
the cab and and basically that person, who I think
was was from Ireland, um basically said that that should
have been your response. Um So anyway, I mean, even
even as we talked about in that behind the scenes episode,
like you can be prepared and still freeze up in
the moment. It happens sometimes. Um, but I the first
time I read that particular publication, I was like, I
(43:31):
feel like I am more prepared now to talk about things.
So if you'd like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, write History Podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. We're also all over social media at miss
in History, and if you want to subscribe to our show,
we're on the iHeart radio app and Apple podcasts and
anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
(43:58):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts, from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are wrapping up our two parter on Cohen's Hell Pro
including it's targeting of so called black nationalist slash hate
(00:25):
groups UM and a targeting of a very vaguely defined
movement known as the New Left. To briefly recap from
part one, which is highly recommended before listening to this
because it includes a lot of context and overview, But
just as a quick recap, we're gonna quote from the
Church Report, which followed more than a year of Senate
(00:46):
Committee hearings into all this quote, the origins of Cohen's
Hell pro demonstrate that the Bureau adopted extra legal methods
to counter perceived threats to national security and public order
because the ordinary legal processes were believed to be insufficient
to do the job. In essence, the Bureau took the
law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation
(01:11):
against domestic enemies. Whether those targets were really enemies, though,
that is a different question. The report went on to say,
quote the choice of individuals and organizations to be neutralized
and disrupted ranged from the violent elements of the Black
Panther Party to Martin Luther King Jr. Who the Bureau
concedes was an advocate of non violence, from the Communist
(01:33):
Party to the Ku Klux Klan, from the advocates of
violent revolutions such as the Weatherman, to the supporters of
peaceful social change, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
the Inter University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy. Just
a heads up in this episode, there are going to
be some discussions of suicide and also police violence. In
(01:54):
nineteen sixty seven, the FBI started co Intel pro Black
Nationalist hate groups. For the most part, targeting of civil
rights groups that had been carried out under co Intel
pro CPUSA, which we talked about last time, rolled up
under this newly established program. In the words of the
program supervisor, the targeted groups were selected because they were
(02:16):
believed to be violent or because of their quote radical
or revolutionary rhetoric and actions. On March four, FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover sent a memo to be routed through
forty one FBI field offices. This memo was called counterintelligence program,
black nationalist hate groups, racial intelligence. And this is a
(02:38):
little bit long, but it's so illustrative of what the
FBI was doing here and more generally, what Hoover's mindset
was across the other co intel pros. We're going to
read a chunk of it. So it began quote goals
for maximum effectiveness of the counterintelligence program and to prevent
wasted effort. Long range goals are being set. Number one,
(03:01):
prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity,
there is strength, a truism that is no less valid
for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist
groups might be the first step toward a real mau
Mau in America, the beginning of a true Black revolution. So,
for context, mau Mau is a reference to the Mau
(03:22):
Mao movement and uprising in Kenya, which advocated a violent
overthrow of British colonial rule. This went on to prevent
the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify
the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been
such a messiah. He is the martyr of the movement today.
(03:42):
Martin Luther King stokely. Carmichael and Elijah Mohammed all aspire
to this position. Elijah Mohammed is less of a threat
because of his age, King could be a very real
contender for this position should he abandon his supposed quote
obedience to quote white liberal doctrines and at sees nonviolence
and embrace Black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to
(04:06):
be a real threat in this way. Number three prevent
violence on the part of black nationalist groups. This is
of primary importance and is of course a goal of
our investigative activity. It should also be a goal of
the counter intelligence program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize
them before they exercise their potential for violence. Number four
(04:30):
prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability
by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community.
The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically
in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals
to first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be
(04:51):
discredited to the white community. Both the responsible community and
to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black
nationalist Simply because they are negroes. Third, these groups must
be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals the followers
of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics
(05:12):
from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical
statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group. It
adds respectability in a different way. Number five. A final
goal should be to prevent the long range growth of
militant black organizations, especially among youths. Specific tactics to prevent
(05:33):
these groups from converting young people must be developed. This
memo went on to outline the primary targets of this
Cohen's help pro that everything we just read was going
to apply to These were the organizations that Hoover described
as the quote most violent and radical. It included the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
(05:58):
Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Nation of Islam. This is
an incredibly weird list. Snake has non violent right into
the name, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther
King Jr. Helped found this represents the whole spectrum of
from non violent direct action to revolutionary Black nationalism, and
(06:23):
the FBI even noted that in its view, some individual
members of the Nation of Islam had been involved in violence,
but the organization itself was not violent. It was being
targeted because of its separatism. Basically, the FBI grouped a
lot of different organizations with a wide range of objectives
and ideologies and tactics under this co intel pro that
(06:44):
was supposedly about black nationalism and hate groups. Some, as
Tracy just mentioned, were strictly pacifist, Some advocated gun ownership
or violent self defense, Some spoke in very theoretical terms
about the need for a revolution, and some of them
called for an actual armed uprising or other violence. All
(07:06):
very different ideologies, but still under this one umbrella. The
FBI classed them all together as violent and radical, viewing
virtually any organization calling for equal rights for black people
as potentially violent and as a consequence, as needing to
be disrupted. Yeah. Like, the thing that that these all
had in common was like black people say quality equality please,
(07:29):
or like demanding equality with very aggressive rhetoric and sometimes violence. Like,
that's what it all had in common. The FBI put
intense effort into discrediting and disrupting all these organizations and
other organizations that were not specifically named using all the
methods that we talked about in Part one. But about
a year after this Coin's Hell Pro was established, another
different organization rose to national prominence, and that was the
(07:52):
Black Panther Party, and this Coin's Hell Pro then pivoted
to shift almost exclusively on that. The Black Panther Party,
originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, was
founded in Oakland, California, in nineteen sixty six by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seal. A lot of the Black Panthers
rhetoric was radical and revolutionary, arguing that the only way
(08:14):
black people could be truly free is if they were
able to govern their own affairs. When they were establishing
the party, Newton and Seal crafted a ten point program
which began, we want freedom, We want power to determine
the destiny of our black community. This ten point program
went on to call for full employment, an end to
(08:35):
quote the robbery by the capitalists of our black community,
decent housing, education, exemption from military service for black men,
an end to police brutality, freedom for black men who
were held in prisons and jails, and it ended quote
we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.
(08:55):
The Ten Point Plan elaborated on each of these points.
The eemption from military service stemmed from the United States
involvement in Vietnam and the idea that black people should
not be forced to serve in the military of a
nation that did not protect them. The idea behind the
release of incarcerated black men was that they had not
been given a fair and impartial trial, so their convictions
(09:18):
were not valid. As part of their work, the Black
Panthers started more than thirty community service programs known as
survival programs. These included things like free breakfast programs for
school children, a tuberculosis screening and treatment program, medical clinics,
ambulance services, legal aid, and education programs. The Black Panthers
(09:39):
also created a screening program for sickle cell disease that
later served as a template for the federal government's own
screening programs. Over time, a lot of these services were
expanded to include anyone who was oppressed, including poor white people.
The Black Panthers also showed up to support other marginalized
groups in their own activism. They are meant in two
(10:00):
different times in our Six Impossible episodes, from Sippins to
fish Ins, which focused on direct action demonstrations and similar protests.
In that episode, we talked about the Black Panthers support
of the fish In movement in the Pacific Northwest, and
they're providing meals to disabled activists who took over the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare office in San Francisco
(10:23):
during the Section five oh four protests. But today, the
first thing a lot of people, especially a lot of
white people, think of when someone says the Black Panthers
is guns and violence. The Black Panthers organized armed patrols
of black neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality and
from gang violence. At one point, they staged an armed
(10:43):
takeover of the California State Legislature that was in response
to gun control legislation. As other examples outside of the
party's organized activities, Huie Newton was involved in a shootout
with police in nineteen sixty seven in which an officer
was killed. Bobby Seal was charged but not convicted, with
conspiracy to incite riots at the nineteen sixty eight Democratic
(11:04):
National Convention and of the murder of a nineteen year
old Black Panther who was suspected of being a police
informant in a memo back to headquarters. A California field
office described the Black Panthers as quote the most violence
prone organization of all the extremist groups now operating in
the United States, and that alleged that they were performing
(11:24):
quote not only verbal attacks but also physical attacks on police. Later,
j Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers quote one of
the greatest threats to the nation's internal security. On November night,
several FBI field offices received a memo ordering them to
submit quote imaginative and hard hitting counter intelligence measures aimed
(11:47):
at crippling the BPP, of course, the Black Panther Party.
This directive was expanded to additional field offices in January
of nineteen sixty nine. Kellen's held pro black nationalist hate
groups soon focused almost entirely on the Black Panthers, rather
than on that collection of groups that we outlined earlier
in that nine eight memo of this co intell prose,
(12:09):
two documented actions, two hundred thirty three of them were
against the Black Panthers, using all those various techniques that
we described in Part one as examples, the FBI intentionally
undermined the Black Panthers public service programs, for example, by
sending fake, inflammatory membership materials to food pantries and other
(12:30):
organizations that were donating food for the breakfast programs. The
Bureau used disinformation to try to spark violent conflicts between
the Panthers an area street gangs, and to spark violent
conflicts between the Panthers and police to reinforce the idea
that the Black Panthers were just inherently violent. In nineteen
sixty nine, the FBI became aware of a Black Panther
(12:54):
coloring book. The origins of this book are a little
bit marky, but I can find a Cambone, who was
then known as Mark Teamer, has taken credit for its creation,
and in interview he describes it as a history book.
It depicts slave owners, greedy store owners, and police all
as obese pigs with exaggerated lower tusks. While Cambone has
(13:19):
stressed that these pigs can be any color, which is
why it is a coloring book, they are generally interpreted
as representations of white people, and this book is full
of images of black people, adults and children, men and
women stabbing and shooting the pigs. Black Panther leadership felt
that the coloring book was inappropriate and ordered Cambone to
(13:41):
destroy it, but someone made copies, and after the FBI
obtained one, it made more copies and distributed them as
though the Black Panther Party had officially created this book
with the intent of distributing it to children. The FBI
has harassment of the Black Panthers also went beyond the
organization's membership and its programs. Jean Seeberg was an actress
(14:03):
who donated to the Black Panthers and support of their
breakfast programs. During her pregnancy, the FBI sent false tips
to news organizations alleging that the father of her baby
was a Black Panther. This, of course, was a huge scandal.
Seeberg tried to take her own life. As a result,
she went into labor prematurely and her baby died. According
(14:25):
to family members, she tried to take her own life
every year around the time of the baby's death, and
then she died in nineteen seventy nine. Her death was
ruled a suicide, although some of her families had suspicions
that there was foul play involved, and, perhaps most notoriously,
on December fourth, nineteen sixty nine, the FBI orchestrated a
raid that was carried out by Chicago police, who fired
(14:47):
between eighty two and ninety nine gunshots into an apartment
where several members of the Black Panther Party were sleeping.
Among other involvement, and FBI informant had provided police with
a floor plan of the apartment. Chicago Black Panther leaders
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed and four other
people in the apartment were seriously injured. Police claimed that
(15:10):
this was a violent gunfight, with the Black Panthers being
the first to open fire, but an investigation revealed that
only one shot had been fired from inside the apartment,
most likely by Mark Clark after he had already been
fatally shot by police. According to Hampton's fiance, Debra Johnson,
who was in bed asleep with him when the shooting started,
(15:31):
an officer who came into the apartment after the shooting
stopped asked if Hampton was still alive. Another officer fired
two shots and said he's good and dead now. The
Black Panther Party dissolved in nineteen eight two, with co
intel probe being one of the many factors that contributed
to its end. Former members say it is unrelated to
the New Black Panther Party, which was founded in ninety
(15:54):
nine and is classified as a hate group by the
United States Commission on Civil Rights in the Southern Poverty
Law Center. Let's take a break. The last formal coincal
pro that was described in the Senate investigation reports we're
(16:16):
going to talk about in a little bit was coincal
pro New Left, and that started in and of all
the formally named coincal pros, this was the most loosely focused.
And I mean, as we've discussed, most of them were
loosely focused. As we mentioned in part one, the FBI
didn't really even have a definition for what new Left meant.
(16:38):
The New Left supervisor, who was quoted in the Church
Committee report said quote, I cannot recall any document that
was written defining new Left is such. It is my
impression that the characterization of new Left groups, rather than
being defined at any specific time by document, it more
or less grew. It has never been strictly defined as
(16:59):
far as I know. It is more or less an attitude.
I would think that makes it sound almost like an
advertiser sound bite new Left. It's an attitude. Uh. The
incident that prompted the FBI to create this co Intel.
Pro was a student uprising at Columbia University in ninety
There was a lot involved in this protest, but its
(17:19):
most direct precursor was the university's decision to build a
new gym in Morningside Park. Even though the gym was
being planned for public land, its facilities would mostly be
for use only by the university and not by the public.
To add to that frustration, this was part of an
ongoing pattern of the university's expansion into Harlem, which was
(17:41):
pushing the neighborhoods predominantly black residents out of their homes
in order to build facilities that they were not going
to be allowed to access. So the resulting protest was complicated,
Like we cannot get all into all of the nuances here,
but generally, the university's Student Afro American Society or s
a S started voicing their own and the community's objections
(18:04):
to this gym, and then the school's chapter of the
Students for a Democratic Society or SDS, which was predominantly white,
saw this as an opportunity for a larger protest that
would also focus on the university's involvement with the Vietnam War.
Members of the s a S felt like they were
being talked over and that the SDS was taking the
(18:24):
protests in an entirely different direction. And the end, the
Student Afro American Society took over Hamilton's Hall and the
Students for a Democratic Society took over other buildings on
campus and took the Dean hostage. There were more than
a thousand demonstrators who took part in this campus shutdown
that lasted for a week. At the university's request, the
(18:46):
New York Police Department began clearing the demonstrators on April nine.
Black demonstrators who had taken over Hamilton's Hall left peacefully,
but as more than one thousand police moved into the
other building, some of the other demonstrators verbally and physically resisted,
including by throwing things like shoes, bathroom tiles, and books
(19:08):
at officers. Police forcibly removed people, beating some of the
resisting students and in some cases bystanders with night sticks.
Others were trampled. In the end, one hundred thirty two students,
four faculty members, and twelve police officers were injured. So
co incal pro New Left was motivated by the FBI's
(19:30):
frustrations that the university had not brought in police earlier,
and also by a sense that these types of protests
should not be permitted to happen in the first place.
The directives for coincal pro New Left were distributed by
a memo in May of nineteen eight, and as described
in the Church Report, agents were to gather information on
(19:50):
this is all a quote. One false allegations of police
brutality to quote, counter the widespread charges of police brutality
that invariably arise following student police encounters. Two immorality depicting
the quote scurless and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits,
and living conditions representative of New Left adherents. And three
(20:13):
action by college administrators to quote to show the value
of college administrators and school officials taking a firm stand
and pointing out quote whether and to what extent faculty
members rendered aid and encouragement. Point to sounds like a
lot of the other counterintelligence efforts we've talked about in
co intel pros, but otherwise in the FBI's view, the
(20:38):
use of force against demonstrators was warranted and if demonstrators
were injured in the process, they deserved it. In night,
both the FBI and the NYPD viewed the amount of
force used at Columbia as appropriate and restrained. No tear
gas was used, no one was shot, and the injuries
sustained by students and faculty were minor enough that the
(21:00):
who had to go to the hospital were treated and released.
That's just such such a weird bar, to such a
weird bar of whether their use was appropriate. The use
of forces appropriate was like, well, okay, nobody like died,
was kind of the tone of it. However, the FBI
also had a similar interpretation in cases of police brutality
(21:21):
that we're far more clearly egregious. For example, after riots
broke out during the nine Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
a memo from FBI headquarters to the Chicago Field Office
read quote, once again, the liberal press and the bleeding
hearts and the forces on the left are taking advantage
of the situation in Chicago surrounding the Democratic National Convention
(21:43):
to attack the police and organized law enforcement agencies. We
should be mindful of this situation and develop all possible
evidence to expose this activity and to refute these false allegations. Conversely,
the Walker Report, which was prepared for the National Commission
on the Call Is in Prevention of Violence, concluded that
there really was police wrongdoing a portion of it read quote.
(22:06):
Demonstrators attacked too, and they posed difficult problems for police
as they persisted in marching through the streets, blocking traffic
and intersections. But it was the police who forced them
out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on
the part of the police, there was enough wild club swinging,
enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the
(22:27):
conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed
violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for
crowd dispersal or arrests. To read dispassionately the hundreds of
statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday
nights is to become convinced of the presence of what
(22:47):
can only be called a police riot. So while coen
falpro New Left was ostensibly about targeting this very vaguely
defined collection of left wing demonstrators as being a threat
to national security, it also paired up with this sense
of a much needed law enforcement crackdown that was justified
and necessary, and the need to protect police and other
(23:10):
law enforcement from false accusations of brutality. Aside from that,
it is difficult to talk about co intel Pro New
Left in a cohesive way. The counter intelligence program wound
up targeting virtually every anti war group in the US,
as well as student demonstrators who were demonstrating for just
about any reason. In the words of the Church Report quote,
(23:33):
none of the Bureau witnesses deposed believes the New Left
co intel Pro was generally effective, in part because of
the imprecise targeting. Also, the tone of a lot of
the FBI memos regarding the New Left sound almost baffled.
Agents really did not get these young people, most of
them white and affluent, a lot of them looking like
(23:54):
stereotypical hippies agitating against things like police brutality in the
Vietnam War. Memos include kind of perplexed sounding references to
things like yoga and drugs. Participants in the organization's targeted
under co intel Pro. New Left also tended to be
simultaneously idealistic and cynical, so the Bureau had a harder
(24:17):
time finding informants or infiltrating organizations. For example, the main
phone at the national headquarters of Students for a Democratic
Society had a sign taped to it for more than
a year that said, in capital letters, this phone is tapped. Yeah.
That is not to suggest that the other targeted organizations
were clueless, like they were just particularly cynical about the
(24:41):
Bureau by this point. The people who ultimately got the
ball rolling on exposing Cointel pro were members of anti
war and other activist movements that had been targeted during
these programs history, and we'll talk more about that after
a SPONSI break. Counterintelligence is still part of the FBI's work,
(25:08):
but in terms of these formally named Cohen cell prose,
those came to an end thanks to the work of
some regular people who pulled off a heist. When we
say regular people, they included a cab driver, a daycare
center director, a social worker, and a professor. It sounds
like one of those walk into a bar jokes. I know.
(25:28):
It's my favorite part of these episodes for the number
of reasons, one of them being it's the most straightforward. Yeah.
Also it being just kind of a David and Goliath story,
so it have become clear to many of these groups
that the FBI was targeting them. Left wing activists viewed
the FBI with increasing suspicion, but nobody had evidence of
(25:49):
what they thought was happening. In nineteen seventy, a group
of anti war activists in the Philadelphia area decided to
do something about it. Anti war activists and college professor
or William C. David On came up with the idea.
John and Bonnie Raines, a married couple with small children,
were also involved. John had also been a freedom writer.
(26:11):
Others included Keith Forsyth, Robert Williamson, Judy Finegold, and two
people known by pseudonyms. One of those is Susan Smith
and the other is Ron Durst. A ninth participant dropped
out before the burglary actually took place. There was no
way they could break into the Philadelphia FBI office, which
had tight security, so they looked for other FBI field offices,
(26:34):
finding one nearby in Media, Pennsylvania. This office was housed
in an apartment building with a shared lobby space, which
was adjacent to the county courthouse. They cased this area.
Bonnie rains posed as a student from Swarthmore College and
arranged a meeting under the guise of researching career opportunities
(26:55):
for women at the Bureau. They scheduled their burglary for
March eighth, n d one, the night of the Fight
of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier, reasoning
that most people would be watching the fight. After breaking in,
they removed thousands of files which were being stored in
regular file cabinets. After sorting through what they had stolen,
(27:16):
they mailed selections to newspapers and members of Congress, anonymously
calling themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. Most
of the newspapers returned these documents to the Bureau, but
the Washington Post confirmed their authenticity and ran a front
page story on March ninete. It was titled Stolen Documents
(27:39):
described FBI surveillance activities. The article described surveillance of black
activist organizations and efforts to enhance existing paranoia. To quote
further served to get the point across that there is
an FBI agent behind every mailbox. More mail documents and
more articles followed. J Edgar Hoover officially canceled co Intel
(28:02):
pro on April seven, nineteen seventy one, citing security reasons,
although some co intel pro activities continued just without a
specific name attached, but it wasn't yet clear to anyone
outside the bureau what the term co intel pro meant
or what its scope was. J Edgar Hoover died on
May second, nineteen seventy two. He had been the director
(28:25):
of the FBI for forty eight years. In nineteen seventy
three and nineteen seventy four, NBC journalist Carl Stern filed
a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Those requests were repeatedly turned down until the documents were
finally released under a court order, and that is when
people finally started to get a sense of what co
(28:48):
intel pro meant and just how huge it was. In
nineteen seventy four, Seymour Hirsch wrote a front page article
for The New York Times titled huge CIA operation reported
and US against anti war forces. This article reported that
the CIA was engaged in very Cohen's hell Pro like
(29:08):
operations against peace activists in the US, but the CIA
was not supposed to be operating domestically at all. These
news reports sparked outrage within the government and among the
general public. President Gerald Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission to
investigate the CIA. The House established the Pike Committee to
(29:30):
investigate illegal activities by the CIA, the FBI, and the
n s A. The Pike Committee's report was never published.
On January one, nineteen seventy five, a resolution was introduced
in the Senate to create a committee to investigate federal
intelligence operations and determined quote the extent, if any, to
which illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by
(29:54):
any agency of the federal government. Congressional hearings went on
through five in nineteen seventy six. Senate committee was dubbed
the Church Committee, was headed by Senator Frank Church, a
Democrat from Ohio. The other committee members were selected to
represent a range of viewpoints and experience levels, with the
final group including six Democrats and five Republicans. A staff
(30:17):
of a hundred and fifty people went through the thousands
and thousands of pages of documents that were involved in
all this. We should take a moment to talk about
the FBI documentation. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was
intensely bureaucratic, with a relentless focus on documenting everything. Also,
most of co Intel pros existence took place before the
(30:40):
Freedom of Information Act was passed in nineteen sixty seven.
All of it took place before the Privacy Act amendments
were added in nineteen seventy four, which gave citizens the
right to see the FBI's files about themselves. In other words,
the FBI was writing everything down, and it was not
doing so with the thought that anyone might ever read
(31:01):
any of this outside of the bureau. Whether the information
flow was going out to field offices and agents or
back into headquarters, nobody was disguising their meeting or intent.
Everyone was saying the quiet part loud and doing it
in writing. Also, FBI documents from the co intel pro
era are full of racist slurs and offensive stereotypes of
(31:23):
black people. After the FBI formally started co intel pro
black nationalist slash hate groups, agents talked candidly about how
if they didn't do a good enough job, the Bureau
was going to be forced to hire black agents. This
idea even came with its own slogan that mimicked the
accent of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a rhyming couplet
(31:46):
that ended with the N word, and also as a
continuation of that note. There were only five black FBI
agents during most of the co Intel pro era. They
had been hired as personal assistants or drivers for j.
Edgar Hoover. Then they had been given the title special
agent during World War Two so that they would not
be drafted. So back to the investigations. Most of the
(32:07):
hearings were behind closed doors, both to try to prevent
them from turning into a TV spectacle and also to
protect information about the US methods for conducting intelligence work.
Even so, the hearings were criticized for threatening US intelligence efforts,
and Senator Church was accused of using it to bolster
a presidential bid. While the Church Committee wanted to protect
(32:29):
legitimate US intelligence efforts, it also wanted the public to
have a chance to learn about what was going on,
and to that end, the committee held public hearings in
September and October of nine. These hearings were focused on
specific areas of misconduct. Has included information about a biological
agents program run by the CIA, a domestic surveillance program
(32:53):
from the White House, and the FBI's programs to disrupt
the civil rights movement and the anti Vietnam War movement.
After one hundred twenty six full committee meetings, forty subcommittee meetings,
more than eight hundred witness interviews, and a review of
more than one hundred ten thousand documents, the Church Committee
issued a report that described quote a pattern of reckless
(33:15):
disregard of activities that threatened our constitutional system. And this
was not just unique to the FBI, but the FBI
is our focus here. The report went on to say, quote.
The abusive techniques used by the FBI and Cointel pro
from nineteen fifty six to nineteen seventy one included violations
of both federal and state statutes prohibiting mail fraud, wire fraud,
(33:39):
incitements of violence, sending obscene material through the mail, and extortion.
More fundamentally, the harassment of innocent citizens engaged in lawful
forms of political expression did serious injury to the First
Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and the right of
the people to assemble peaceably and to position the government
(33:59):
for redress of grievances. The report also made it clear
that the national security and violence prevention concerns were not
the FBI's only motivation. Quote. The unexpressed major premise of
the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the
duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats
(34:20):
to the existing social and political order. Eight percent of
the approved co intel pro proposals targeted speakers, teachers, writers,
or publications, meetings, and peaceful demonstrations, all of which were
just exercising a constitutional right to free speech. Operations tried
to stop lawful speakers from speaking, teachers from teaching, writers
(34:44):
from writing, and demonstrators from demonstrating. The Senate Committee made
nineties six recommendations to quote place intelligence activities within the
Constitutional Scheme for controlling government power. This included changes to
how the FBI was that included a ten year term
limit for the Director of the Bureau. It also included
(35:06):
recommendations for additional oversight within the bureau. Every counter intelligence
proposal had to be approved by headquarters, but outside the
Bureau the programs were almost completely unknown. Specific elements of
co intel pro CPUSA and White Hate were both known
to various Attorneys General, presidential advisers, and Cabinet and committee members.
(35:28):
For example, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the bureau's
wire taps of Martin Luther King Jr. The Bureau also
notified multiple Attorneys General of various accomplishments and progress. Those
are their words against the Ku Klux Klan, without describing
the breadth of what had led to that progress. Even
with these two programs, though the full scope wasn't known
(35:51):
outside the bureau, and it appears that the other co
intel pros weren't known to anyone outside the FBI at all.
Efforts to bring in more over site of the bureau's
activities included the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of nineteen seventy eight.
The exposure of Cointelpro and the hearings that followed drastically
affected mainstream American perceptions of the FBI. According to Gallup polls,
(36:16):
the proportion of Americans with a highly favorable view of
the FBI dropped from eighty four percent in nineteen sixty
five to thirty seven in nineteen seventy five. At the
same time, no criminal convictions followed the investigations and the
Church report, even though that report detailed numerous instances of
(36:36):
criminal activity. As we said, the FBI is still engaged
in counter intelligence. In the years just after Cointel Pro
was disbanded, the FBI did extensive counter intelligence work against
the American Indian Movement and the Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador. This included a disinformation campaign
during the nineteen seventies three occupation of Wounded Knee, both
(37:00):
to discredit the American Indian Movement to the general public
and to try to create division within that occupation. Co
Intel pro has also made headlines at numerous points since
the mid seventies, comparing it to policies and programs that
have been introduced during multiple presidential administrations. This includes comparisons
to various aspects of the Patriot Act and the n
(37:23):
says warrantless surveillance programs in the two thousands. The general
focus on black liberation as somehow inherently threatening and violent
has also continued to be part of the FBI's rhetoric.
In eighteen, leaked documents revealed that the FBI had targeted
Black identity extremists as a major threat, with really similar
(37:45):
language about potential violence to what was used during co
Intel pro Quote. The FBI assesses it is very likely
black identity extremist b i E Perceptions of police brutality
against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory lethal
violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as
(38:06):
justification for such violence. This was paired with criticisms that
the FBI and other federal agencies were ignoring credible threats
of white nationalist violence. Yeah, this is basically a very
similar protests to what has been going on in the
last few months. As we're recording this, which is on
July seven, with demonstrators basically saying please stop shooting unarmed
(38:31):
black people, and the FBI creating this this uh category
of black identity extremists led people to go that's not
a thing though. Made that up To circle back around
to the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, none of
them were ever prosecuted in connection with this break in
(38:52):
and media Pennsylvania. It is possible that law enforcement believe
that the culprits went on to be involved with a
different group of anti Vietnam War activists who were known
as the Camden This group broke into the Camden, New
Jersey Draft Board office and they destroyed draft records there.
The Camden twenty eight were acquitted. Two of the Citizens
(39:14):
Commission to Investigate the FBI actually were involved in that.
So there's some speculation that law enforcement was like, well,
they've already been tried and acquitted of this other thing.
We probably have no chance. Regardless, though several members of
the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI came forward in
their story is told in the book The Burglary The
(39:35):
Discovery of Jed your Hoover's Secret FBI by Betty Medsker,
who also wrote that front page Washington Post story that
we mentioned earlier on. I have not read that book,
but I have watched the documentary N One, which also
tells that story's cotel pro I know it was a lot.
(39:58):
Uh D have listener mail to take us out, hopefully
on a peppyard No man. It kind of is um.
This is an email from Allison, I wrote back to Alison,
but I thought other people might also find it helpful.
Allison was writing about the behind the scenes where Holly
and I talked about encountering racism out in the world
(40:20):
and whether we were prepared to counter it, and so
Allison wrote high on today is behind the scenes, Mini Tracy.
I heard you say you have a response at the
ready for when you hear someone say something racist. I'd
love to hear what you would say, or at least
in generalization, because I'm terrible with on the spot responses
and terribly regret and think back on my lack of
(40:41):
response or retort. I'd love to hear your at the
ready so I might be able to have it in
mind and practice, so I can be ready if or
when that should arise in the future. I hope and
wish it would never happen and I'd never have to
hear anything as such. It's just horrible. I love what
you both do and never miss an episode. Thanks very much, Allison.
So a thing that I am prepared to say, Like,
(41:02):
let's say I'm at the grocery store and the line
is moving really slowly, which it probably is right now,
and somebody behind me implies that it's because the person
running the cash register is incompetent because of their race.
I might say, I hope you're not saying that to
me because you think I agree with you. I first
(41:22):
heard that on a podcast. I'm pretty sure it was
on an episode of Politically Reactive towards the end of
its run, but I'm not actually sure. And like that
is when I want to make it clear to that
person that that's not acceptable the thing that they just said.
But I'm also like not wanting to start a fight
with that person that's a stranger in public. UM. If
I'm talking to a family member and the family member
(41:45):
says something that is is racist on some level, I
might say, I don't understand what you mean by that?
Could you explain it to me? Um? And then a
lot of times that, like, as a person is talking,
they will hear the words they are saying. UM. A
good resource I I have found is if you google
(42:06):
responding to Everyday Bigotry, the first or second result should
be a pamphlet that was published by the Southern Poverty
Law Center that combines a lot of like real world,
anonymous examples of when people have encountered bigotry in their
everyday lives and like practical responses to that. UM. I
(42:27):
like that it's a publication that's been around for a while,
it doesn't cover every conceivable thing, and it is based
on people's personal experiences. UM. But if you're like I
don't I don't know what I should say when something happens,
like that can be a good starting point for folks. UM.
So you're so much more thoughtful because I can read
all of that, but in the moment, what I say
(42:49):
is you're a racist expletive, as probably evidenced by my
story about where I wanted to punch a stranger in public.
So um yeah, uh yeah, I And and that that
applies to family members as well. Somebody tweeted at us
about that story that you had told about being in
(43:09):
the cab and and basically that person, who I think
was was from Ireland, um basically said that that should
have been your response. Um So anyway, I mean, even
even as we talked about in that behind the scenes episode,
like you can be prepared and still freeze up in
the moment. It happens sometimes. Um, but I the first
time I read that particular publication, I was like, I
(43:31):
feel like I am more prepared now to talk about things.
So if you'd like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, write History Podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. We're also all over social media at miss
in History, and if you want to subscribe to our show,
we're on the iHeart radio app and Apple podcasts and
anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
(43:58):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts, from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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