Date: 1956–1971
Location: United States
The Conspirators: Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Victims: Progressive political factions
During the civil rights era, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover aggressively and systematically conducted covert operations that were intended to subvert and/or sabotage various domestic groups with Communist ties through a program called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). These operations included illegal surveillance without warrants; planting of false rumors and news stories to create suspicion of these groups; and work with local police stations to conduct raids against targets, some of which resulted in violence and death.
What really makes COINTELPRO controversial is that its operations gradually expanded to include targeting progressive movements that Hoover considered “subversive,” including antiwar protesters, civil rights groups, feminist organizations, the Black Panthers, gay rights groups, and even Martin Luther King Jr. The most conspiratorial claims charge that beatings and even direct assassinations were performed against American citizens to intimidate and silence America’s progressive voices.
The FBI did systematically harass and threaten certain factions in the United States, and got away with it until they were exposed by investigators.
The COINTELPRO program was started in 1956 by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI specifically to disrupt the Communist Party USA, a legitimate political party that still exists today, little different from other minor political parties (Libertarian Party, Green Party, etc.). The FBI got quite creative. They had the IRS conduct unwarranted audits against them. They made up stories about some members and sent the stories to other members. Rifts within the party were sought and fed.
But over the next fifteen years COINTELPRO drifted away from its original goal. It’s no secret that J. Edgar Hoover regarded pretty much everyone he didn’t like (immigrants, liberals, members of the African-American and LGBTQ communities, etc.) to be Communists, so COINTELPRO’s mission expanded to harass those groups as well—anyone who could have the label of “Communist” slapped on them.
COINTELPRO’s cover was blown almost by accident. A group of eight Vietnam War protesters, calling themselves the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI,” were responsible for unveiling the program to the world. They spoke of the United States’ “war against Indochina” and criticized the United States for war profiteering. Some of them had formerly been members of the Camden 28, a group which in 1971 raided and destroyed a New Jersey draft board office, where Vietnam War draftees were processed. The Citizens’ Commission planned a similar raid on an FBI office in Pennsylvania, hoping to reveal evidence of crimes they believed the FBI was committing against American citizens. What they stumbled into revealed COINTELPRO to the world.
The Citizens’ Commission selected an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and kept it under surveillance to figure out when it was most likely to be vacant. Finally they broke into the office in the middle of the night and seized more than 1,000 pages of documents. From the office, they went directly to a public pay telephone, called the Reuters news agency, and read a statement. It said in part:
As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it. As long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of a small clique not subject to democratic scrutiny and control. Then repression, intimidation, and entrapment are to be expected.
The burglars made copies of the stolen documents and sent them to major newspapers nationwide, but initially nobody published them. Not only were the newspapers uncertain of whether the documents were real, but they risked publishing information about ongoing FBI operations and potentially jeopardizing agents. Finally, after two weeks, The Washington Post broke the story.
Meanwhile the FBI was trying to figure out who broke into their office. Two hundred agents spent five years trying to catch the thieves, but they never made any progress. The statute of limitations expired, and the investigation was ultimately dropped, unsolved. It wasn’t until 2014 that a journalist, Betty Medsger, interviewed all eight of the burglars—five men and three women. Her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I., told the complete story, and identified all the burglars, now safe from prosecution due to the expiration of the statute of limitation. Two used pseudonyms.
COINTELPRO was a real operation. It formally began in 1956, but the FBI had been following similar policies to a lesser extent for some time. Who the real targets of COINTELPRO were depends somewhat upon who you ask. The program was created to disrupt the activities of Communist infiltrators in the United States, but according to the FBI, it was eventually expanded to other subversive groups, namely the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panthers, groups that arguably do have some subversive elements. But if you ask most other people they will name mainly peaceful civil rights groups. It seems that almost everyone’s version of who COINTELPRO targeted is an effort to color history by emphasizing the FBI’s actions against whatever groups they personally support. But the shocking reality is that the FBI did take actions of one kind or another against nearly all of these groups, so in effect, just about anything you want to criticize about COINTELPRO is true.
So does this count as a conspiracy that’s been proven true? It’s still a difficult argument to make. The eight burglars were mainly interested in protesting the Vietnam War and didn’t have any idea of the scope of the documents they ended up finding (though it’s doubtful that they were surprised). On the other hand, J. Edgar Hoover’s attitudes toward what he saw as the “subversive left” were well known, and it was something of an open secret that the FBI did the kinds of things described in the COINTELPRO documents. Their discovery of the documents simply put a name on it, and confirmed its activities and existence.
Although the specifics of the program may have been lacking until the discovery of the documents, the fact that the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies were doing this kind of thing had been general knowledge for a long time. In 1975, the US Senate formed the Church Committee to investigate the specific revelations from the stolen COINTELPRO documents.
Perhaps one of the most shocking actions undertaken as part of COINTELPRO was a letter written by the FBI and sent anonymously to Martin Luther King Jr. It threatened him, insulted him, and advised him to commit suicide. The Church Committee found a copy in J. Edgar Hoover’s personal documents. The letter concluded:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days left in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
When all was said and done, the most important result of the Church Committee was the establishment of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, made up of rotating members from a broad spectrum of the Senate, charged with overseeing the activities of the intelligence agencies.