A THREAT OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE

Members of a group will seldom learn that an FBI intelligence informant has been in their midst or has copied their records for the FBI because intelligence investigations almost invariably do not result in prosecutions.

Extreme care must be taken in the use or dissemination of this information to paraphrase it so as to not reveal the identity of the informant.

Gerald Kirk had an appointment to get to. Kirk, a twenty-year-old African-American student and recent recruit of the Communist Party USA, had received a call the night before inviting him to meet. The caller, who Kirk did not know, instructed him to meet at 8pm at the Hyde Park Theater in Chicago. Kirk followed the instructions precisely and at the appointed hour a blue 1961 Chevrolet pulled up. Kirk got in.

The driver, a man in his fifties named “Herb,” quickly got down to business. He told Kirk that he too was a member of the Communist Party and had been for thirty years. He said that “he welcomed the chance to talk to a young man who was interested in true revolutionary practice.” He explained that he was part of something called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, a group working within the Communist Party USA to build “a true Marxist Leninist Party” – the current CP being anti-revolutionary, carrying out a revisionist line. The Ad Hoc Committee, according to Herb, had formed in order “to develop a new line” that would follow the revolutionary teachings of MAO Zedong. In order to do this, they were recruiting people from within the Communist Party itself. Herb then got to the point of why he had asked for a meeting – would Kirk be interested in joining him? Specifically, would he be willing to work with “the blacks in the ghetto, on the University of Chicago campus,” and with the anti-war leader, Rennie Davis? Kirk was non-committal. He told the older man he would need to think about it, but knew already it was a nonstarter. Along with being a student, campus activist, and Communist cadre, he was also busy… working as an FBI informant. Unbeknownst to Kirk, however, he was not alone in this. “Herb” himself was an informant.³ More than that, the organization he claimed to represent was a super-secret, whole-cloth construction of the FBI, created explicitly to disrupt the Communist Party USA in Chicago. Kirk, it seems, had been approached in furtherance of that cause.

When Gerald Kirk met “Herb” (“Herb” Block [Bureau quotes], according to the document) in the spring of 1968 the FBI had been in the business of domestic intelligence, and the critical element of informant penetration, for over fifty years. Through those years they sharpened their methodology to a razor’s edge, specifically in countering domestic subversion.

The history of this is consequential. In 1908 the Attorney General, Charles J. Bonaparte, established the Bureau of Investigation, an agency charged with “investigating” – investigation being the catchall euphemism for aggressively targeting – “suspected anarchists, Bolsheviks, socialists, and other radicals.” The Bureau’s first major undertaking in this regard came in 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, along with the twenty-four-year-old Justice Department attorney J. Edgar Hoover, oversaw a campaign between November 1919 and January 1920 aimed at foreign-born radicals, commonly known as the Palmer Raids.⁴ Thousands of people were taken into custody in the ensuing raids carried out throughout the country. While the aim of deporting thousands fell short – in the end hundreds were deported – the ability to round up entire populations of dissidents, and the implicit tracking and monitoring involved in being able to execute such an initiative, was successfully accomplished.⁵

While the Palmer Raids targeted immigrants, anarchists, and communists, far and away the Bureau’s chief target throughout the twentieth century was the Communist Party USA. The CPUSA had arisen with the Russian Revolution and it was that group’s support of the Soviet Union that was at once its source of strength and its undoing. It was also the focus of Hoover’s life-long obsession – the influence of foreign powers within the borders of the United States. How this all played out left marks deep and lasting.

While the CPUSA had weathered no small amount of repression in the Twenties – including the Palmer Raids – by the mid-1930s they had attained, if not a level of legitimacy, at least room to maneuver through its “Popular Front” – its anti-fascist stance. This all came undone with the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Germany, which saw the Party sharply at odds with the geopolitical imperative of the US government. One sharp consequence of that was that the group’s leader, Earl Browder, was jailed in October 1939, ostensibly for a passport violation.⁶

Browder’s imprisonment underscored the tenuous position the Party occupied. As long as it was not fundamentally challenging US power or its global interests there was a level of tolerance of its existence. If it did challenge those interests all bets were off. This can be seen starkly in the fact that while Browder was released in 1943 after the CP shifted its policy in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, when the Grand Alliance of the US, England, and the USSR evaporated with the Cold War, the CPUSA again came into the crosshairs of the Justice Department.⁷ This time eleven of their top leaders – Browder by then had been expelled from the CPUSA – were arrested and put on trial and then imprisoned (a few fled abroad) for subversion under the Smith Act. That trial in 1949 heralded what would be the worst decade for the Communist Party.⁸

The FBI effort against the CPUSA was conducted under the organizational rubric of an “internal security” investigation, or “IS” in FBI shorthand. The internal security investigation – like others – was a far-reaching undertaking which included aggressive surveillance, high and low harassment, compiling lists for their Security Index of those slated for apprehension and detainment in the event of a “national emergency,” and informant penetration.

The Bureau’s Internal Security investigations were essentially counterintelligence operations. Broadly speaking, counterintelligence or “CI” – as those who deploy it refer to it – is defined as coordinated efforts to counter strategic threats, particularly those posed by foreign powers.⁹ Here’s how the CIA has defined the term:

Counterintelligence is both an activity and its product. The product is reliable information about all those enemies of a country who attack it by stealth. Some of these enemies are professional intelligence officers and the agents who serve them. Others act under cover to promote subversion or insurrection rather than espionage or counterintelligence. Still others may be non-Communists or anti-Communists who employ the same underground tactics to try to take by stealth and force what they cannot gain through winning the open allegiance of a free people.¹⁰

FBI Inventory sheet of Revolutionary Union surveillance photos and documents

While today the focus of much of CI is anti-terrorism, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the element of anti-subversion was pronounced. It is not surprising then that when the Bureau was most aggressively targeting the CPUSA they established something they specifically named the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. While this was something that would later be expanded to include four other sections – “Black extremists,” the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, and the Klan – the CPUSA COINTELPRO was the first and most long-lasting.¹¹

Still, COINTELPRO and counterintelligence were two different things, and the latter was much more fundamental to the Bureau’s work. Indeed, according to the Bureau “about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period” (they do not say which fifteen years) were associated with the nominal COINTELPROs.¹² While it is possible that in its white-hot years, COINTELPRO may have commanded a larger footprint, it is still dwarfed by the agency’s other activity.

INFORMANTS – THE KEY LINK

When the Church Committee investigating US intelligence activity issued its final report in 1976, they placed the section dealing with informants in the center of their report, yet by their own estimate that section described the most significant activity the Bureau had undertaken. Here is how they assessed things:

The paid and directed informant is the most extensively used technique in FBI domestic intelligence investigations. Informants were used in 85 percent of the domestic intelligence investigations analyzed in a recent study by the General Accounting Office.¹³

The report went on to note that by comparison electronic surveillance was used in only five percent of the cases studied.¹⁴ Given that, it seems no exaggeration to say that if counterintelligence was the essence of FBI activity, then informant penetration was the key element of counterintelligence.

The use of informants against the Communist Party USA is a good measure of this. The informant penetration against that organization from the 1950s into the 1960s was at the level of fourhundred informants and greater, this despite the fact that the group was hemorrhaging members from the 1950s onward. By the early Sixties the CP had only several thousand members, but they still had hundreds of informants. Likewise, the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization of the Sixties, is estimated to have had at least one informant in every chapter – the number of SDS chapters at their peak in 1968, reaching threehundred – and some chapters had multiple informants.¹⁵

Looked at another way, organizations could have been built of FBI informants – and in some cases the Bureau did exactly that – albeit made up of very small numbers. This was the case, for example, of the Red Star Cadre in Florida and the Red Collective in New Orleans¹⁶ – the former group was run by an informant named Joe Burton, who later went public with his FBI affiliation; the latter entity was exposed through court proceedings.¹⁷ One of the advantages of this particular model is the way organizations could speak up for individuals, lending a “radical” legitimacy that may or may not exist. This can be seen in the “reference” letter written by FBI informant Jill Schafer to someone in Florida who was doing due diligence on Joe Burton:

Our collective has been acquainted with Joe and several other persons connected with Red Star Cadre since June 1972. We find his background to be beyond reproach, with anti-imperialist activities and sentiments going back for many years.¹⁸

While such “notional” collectives – and their ability to validate informants as revolutionaries – were able to accomplish certain things, their effort paled in comparison to another Bureau effort. This was an initiative to undermine the CPUSA through something called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, which was in fact created by an FBI Special Agent named Herbert K. Stallings. Stallings actually wrote a number of ostensible “pro-Chinese Communist Party” bulletins, called the Ad Hoc Bulletin – something to be discussed in depth a bit further in this volume.

It is the case that much of the history of political repression in the Sixties revolves around the FBI and its formal COINTELPRO programs: the black-bag jobs, poison-pen letters, schemes of deception to isolate and tar individual reputations, etc. So much has been written about this topic that for many it stands as the activity of the Bureau, or least its most significant activity. What has not been explored sufficiently is the matter of informants, and not just any informants, but those that got to the very top of their target organizations. These were people who were in leadership, and in turn were positioned to greatly impact the operation, direction, and lives of the members of these groups. That the Bureau was able to do this and do it repeatedly challenges many standing notions of the FBI, including that of the over-eager button-down and largely ineffective government bureaucrat. Instead there was a highly effective coterie within the Bureau with a great degree of political sophistication proceeding from a strategic plan.

It also argues against the caricature of the FBI – or of J. Edgar Hoover, who has come to be the stand-in for the wider organization in this period – as a coarse, overzealous opponent of everything related to dissent. While a characterization not without truth, it misses a bigger point. Hoover’s reign coincided with the appearance of the communist project of the twentieth century; his tenure was thus anchored and informed by larger historic circumstances. His death, ironically, came right at a time when the world’s largest communist country, Maoist China, was in the process of reversing course – symbolized by Nixon’s visit to that country in 1972. The Bureau he had led, by the end of the Seventies, was being impelled in other directions. There was, in other words, rhyme and reason amid the overreach and irrationality.

As for the groups that were the FBI targets, their response is instructive. Beyond the combination of disbelief, denial, and even acceptance of the Bureau’s assaults, was a mistaken view that a correct political line, the supremacy of their ideals, was sufficient to withstand the attacks – if not in the short run, then in the long. How that worked in practice is a lesson in repeated failure, one with historic precedent.