Overview
COINTELPRO (an acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the FBI between 1956 and 1971. Directed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the programs aimed to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt domestic American political organizations that the FBI deemed "subversive." Targets ranged from the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party to the civil rights movement, Black nationalist organizations, the American Indian Movement, anti-Vietnam War groups, and white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
Scope and Operations
COINTELPRO encompassed hundreds of operations organized into several sub-programs:
- COINTELPRO-CPUSA (1956): Targeting the Communist Party USA
- COINTELPRO-SWP (1961): Targeting the Socialist Workers Party
- COINTELPRO-White Hate Groups (1964): Targeting the KKK and white supremacist groups
- COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist/Hate Groups (1967): Targeting the Black Panther Party, SCLC, SNCC, Nation of Islam, and other Black organizations
- COINTELPRO-New Left (1968): Targeting anti-war and student activist groups
Tactics
The FBI employed a systematic toolkit of disruption tactics:
Surveillance and Infiltration
The FBI placed informants and undercover agents inside targeted organizations. At its peak, the Black Panther Party had so many FBI informants that in some chapters, the infiltrators outnumbered genuine members. William O'Neal, an FBI informant, served as the Black Panthers' head of security in Chicago.
Psychological Warfare
The FBI created and distributed anonymous letters, forged correspondence, and planted false stories in cooperative media outlets to sow distrust within organizations. Agents sent anonymous letters to the spouses of targeted individuals alleging affairs, attempted to provoke violence between rival groups, and distributed cartoons and pamphlets designed to create internal conflicts.
Legal Harassment
The FBI worked with local police to arrest activists on minor or fabricated charges, initiate tax investigations, and create legal difficulties designed to drain resources and morale.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Campaign
Perhaps the most notorious COINTELPRO operation was the sustained campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Hoover called "the most dangerous Negro in America." The FBI:
- Wiretapped King's phones and bugged his hotel rooms (authorized by Attorney General Robert Kennedy)
- Compiled recordings of King's private life and sent them to his wife Coretta Scott King
- Sent King an anonymous letter in 1964 widely interpreted as urging him to commit suicide before his Nobel Prize ceremony
- Attempted to replace King with a more "acceptable" Black leader
- Monitored his every movement until his assassination in 1968
The Fred Hampton Assassination
On December 4, 1969, members of the Chicago Police Department, acting on information provided by FBI informant William O'Neal, raided the apartment of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Hampton, who had been drugged by O'Neal, was shot and killed in his bed along with Mark Clark. An investigation by a federal grand jury later found that the police had fired between 82 and 99 shots while the Panthers had fired only one. In 1982, the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government paid $1.85 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit brought by the survivors and families.
Discovery and Exposure
COINTELPRO was exposed on March 8, 1971, when a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole over 1,000 classified documents. These files were distributed to newspapers, revealing the scope of the FBI's domestic surveillance and disruption programs. The burglars were never caught, and their identities remained secret until 2014 when several participants came forward.
The subsequent Church Committee investigation (1975-1976) conducted a thorough review and confirmed the existence and illegal nature of COINTELPRO operations. The committee's final report documented systematic violations of First Amendment rights and recommended significant reforms to FBI oversight.
Legacy
COINTELPRO is one of the most significant confirmed domestic government conspiracies in American history. It demonstrates that government agencies systematically violated the constitutional rights of American citizens and used their power to suppress political dissent. The revelations led to:
- Guidelines restricting FBI domestic intelligence operations (the Levi Guidelines, 1976)
- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, 1978)
- The creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Intelligence Committee for ongoing oversight
- Lasting distrust of federal law enforcement within civil rights and activist communities