COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a covert FBI domestic operations program that ran from 1956 to 1971, using infiltration, psychological warfare, mail interception, false communications, and coordination with local law enforcement to neutralize organizations the Bureau identified as subversive threats. The program was directed from FBI headquarters in Washington under Director J. Edgar Hoover and operated through field offices across the country. It was exposed in March 1971 when a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI's field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and distributed stolen documents including COINTELPRO materials to the press. It was subsequently documented in detail by the Church Committee.¹

Targets

COINTELPRO operated against multiple distinct categories of targets through separate operational programs:

• Communist Party USA: the original program, beginning in 1956, the largest in scope and duration
• Socialist Workers Party (SWP): beginning 1961; targeted a legal political party that maintained it had never engaged in any illegal activity
• White Hate Groups: beginning 1964, targeting the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations
• Black Nationalist and Black Power groups: beginning 1967, the most aggressive domestic program, targeting the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and numerous Black civil rights organizations. Hoover characterized the program's goal as preventing the rise of a "Black Messiah" who could "unify and electrify the militant Black Nationalist movement"
• New Left: beginning 1968, targeting antiwar organizations, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and campus-based political groups

FBI memoranda from 1967-1969 used explicit language about "neutralizing" targets, preventing them from organizing, and "creating factionalism."¹

Methods

COINTELPRO employed documented methods including:

• Infiltration: placing informants and agents inside targeted organizations to gather intelligence and deliberately create internal discord
• Pseudopropaganda: creating and distributing fabricated internal communications to sow distrust between members or leadership factions, including anonymous letters to spouses of targeted individuals making false claims
• Wrongful prosecution: providing false or misleading information to local prosecutors; fabricating evidence to bring charges against leaders of targeted organizations
• Burglary and mail interception: "black bag jobs" involving unauthorized entries to plant surveillance equipment or search files; illegal mail covers
• Tax investigation referrals: referring targeted individuals to the IRS for harassment through tax audits
• Coordination with local law enforcement: sharing intelligence with local police who were then free to take action; this coordination in some documented cases led to violence against targeted individuals. The Church Committee documented coordination in the deaths of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Chicago police raid on December 4, 1969, in which FBI informant William O'Neal provided the floor plan of Hampton's apartment to law enforcement in advance of the raid.¹

Relationship to Operation CHAOS

COINTELPRO (FBI) and Operation CHAOS (CIA) operated in the same period targeting the same demographic of antiwar and radical organizations, and were institutionally linked through the CACTUS interagency program. The CACTUS pipeline served as the conduit for exchange of intelligence between the CIA's CHAOS operation and the FBI's COINTELPRO, allowing both agencies to develop overlapping dossiers on American citizens and organizations and to coordinate targeting without either agency having to formally acknowledge the other's domestic surveillance activities. Richard Ober's CHAOS Special Operations Group sent more than 5,000 reports to the FBI over seven years, while receiving FBI-generated information in return.¹²

Exposure and Investigation

On March 8, 1971, a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and removed approximately 1,000 documents. The group distributed these documents to several newspapers and to members of Congress. The documents included materials explicitly describing COINTELPRO operations and the word "COINTELPRO" itself. Despite the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all receiving the documents, only one newspaper (the Los Angeles Times) printed a story in the immediate aftermath; most papers sat on the material. The full scope became public only gradually.

Hoover formally terminated COINTELPRO on April 27, 1971, less than two months after the Media break-in, citing the need to protect the Bureau from further disclosure.¹

The Church Committee documented COINTELPRO in its final report, concluding: "Many of the targets of COINTELPRO were not criminals or terrorists but were private citizens who openly advocated unpopular ideas and who committed no illegal acts." The Committee found that "groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and not their criminal conduct." The Bureau's own records showed it had opened more than half a million domestic intelligence files since 1960. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976, is the primary published government record of COINTELPRO.¹

The Senate Intelligence Committee's book-length study of domestic CIA and FBI surveillance activities, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976), remains the definitive primary-source compilation of the program's documented scope.¹