July 20, 2020 • 40 mins
FBI surveillance of people associated with the civil rights movement has come up on the show many times. Today, we’re going to talk about the history of the FBI, especially as it related to communism and “subversive threats,” and how that fed directly into COINTELPRO.
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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 Frying. Something that
has come up several times on our show is FBI
surveillance of people who were associated with the civil rights
(00:23):
movement in the United States. Most recently, we talked about
the bureau creating this file on James Baldwin that was
more than seventeen hundred pages long, and in earlier episodes,
we've talked about things like the FBI using wire taps
to spy on Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.
A lot of this surveillance was connected to a series
(00:43):
of counterintelligence programs or Cohen's hell pros that primarily targeted
left wing organizations and people in the US from nineteen
fifty six until nineteen seventy one. The FBI framed this
as work that was necessary to prevent violence and protect
national purity, But a whole lot of the people and
organizations that they targeted, we're not violent and we're not
(01:05):
threatening national security. Mostly they were just threatening the status quo,
and the FBI pursued the one co intel pro that
really really was focused on violent organizations with a totally
different end in mind than what it pursued with the
other operations. Um, this is one of those topics that
includes a whole lot of history that is just a
(01:26):
complicated tangle, So we're gonna tackle it in two parts. Today,
we'll talk about the history of the FBI, especially as
it related to communism and perceived subversive threats, because all
that fed directly into co Intel Pro. We're also going
to give an overview of the types of tactics that
the FBI used across these various programs, and we're going
(01:48):
to talk about the one co intel pro that was
kind of an outlier in all of this, which was
co Intel Pro White Hate. Next time, we will get
into some of the specifics of the co intel pros
that geted black liberation organizations and the new Left, as
well as how these programs were finally exposed to the public.
The investigation team that would become the US Federal Bureau
(02:10):
of Investigation was established in nineteen o eight, and at
first this was a small group of newly hired investigators
who worked for the Department of Justice under the Office
of the Chief Examiner. Before this point, when the Department
of Justice needed investigators, it had either hired private investigators
or borrowed investigators from other departments. In nineteen o nine,
(02:32):
the Office of the Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau
of Investigation. The Bureau's work involved enforcing federal law and
helping to protect the nation from threats. In nineteen seventeen,
just after the US entered World War One, Congress passed
the Espionage Act, or an Act to punish acts of
interference with foreign relations, the neutrality of the foreign commerce
(02:55):
of the United States, to punish espionage and better to
enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for
other purposes. The Bureau of Investigation had become the government's
largest investigative agency, and it was tasked with enforcing the
Espionage Act. The Bureau of Investigation also had an assortment
of other duties, including guarding the US border with Mexico
(03:17):
during the Mexican Revolution. The same year that the Espionage
Act was passed, j Edgar Hoover joined the Department of Justice.
The following year, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which expanded
the Espionage Act to focus on anti war activists and socialists.
The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to quote, willfully, utter, print, rite,
(03:39):
or publish any disloyal, profane, scureless, or abusive language about
the form of the government of the United States. It
also outlawed urging, inciting, or advocating any curtailment or reduction
in the production of war material. Then, in nineteen nineteen
U s. Attorney General amish Will Palmer his home was bombed.
(04:01):
This was part of a series of male bombings carried
out that year, with seven other bombings happening on that
same night. We have a two part episode on the
bombings and the massive series of raids and deportations that followed,
and that two parter originally came out in twenties sixteen.
J Edgar Hoover led a team to investigate these bombings,
and the espionage and Sedition Acts were a big part
(04:24):
of it. The raids, incarcerations, and deportations that followed became
known as the Palmer Raids and they were part of
the first Red Scare, which was a widespread fear of Bolshevists, anarchists, socialists,
and immigrants as a threat to American life and national
security by Attorney General Palmer's handling of these investigations had
(04:46):
come under intense scrutiny from both within and outside of
the US government. On May of that year, a team
of twelve lawyers issued a report on the raids. Mr
report detailed cruel and unusual punishments, arrests without warrant, unreasonable
search as in seizures, compelling persons to witness against themselves,
propaganda by the Department of Justice, and provocative agents, which
(05:10):
were basically operatives who entrapped people. Palmer's reputation suffered as
a result of all this, and he returned to private
practice after failing to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
William J. Flynn was director of the Bureau of Investigation
at the time, and soon he was replaced as well.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts were repealed in nineteen twenty
(05:32):
and ninety one, but Hoover's reputation wasn't really tarnished by
his involvement in all this. Soon he was being groomed
to take over the Bureau. J. Edgar Hoover became the
Bureau of Investigations director in nineteen twenty four, and the
Bureau was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in nineteen
thirty five. Of course, there is a ton of history
(05:55):
between when Hoover joined the Department of Justice and when
the FBI started its co into prose. Hoover was involved
in modernizing and standardizing the FBI, and the bureau itself
was involved in investigating organized crime during prohibition. During World
War Two, the FBI also maintained lists of Japanese, German,
(06:15):
and Italian nationals believed to be a threat to domestic
security and kept those people under surveillance. Then, of course,
Japanese immigrants and their American born descendants were incarcerated under
Executive Order ninety sixty six. That is also covered any
previous two parter of the podcast. The Central Intelligence Agency
(06:35):
was founded in nineteen forty seven to focus on foreign intelligence.
That left the FBI to focus on domestic intelligence and
on investigating federal crimes. This creation of the CIA happened
under the National Security Act of nineteen forty seven, and
that act also included this definition of counter intelligence quote
information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other
(07:01):
intelligence activities, sabotage or assassinations conducted by or on behalf
of foreign governments or elements thereof foreign organizations or foreign persons,
or international terrorist activities. A big part of this same
time span was the fight against communism. Following a precedent
that had been set by the Palmer Aids, the First
(07:23):
Red Scare, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts, in nineteen forty,
Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, also known as the
Smith Act, and this act included clauses that made it
illegal for any citizen or resident of the US to quote, advocate,
a bet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or
(07:43):
propriety of overthrowing, or destroying any government in the United
States by force or violence. Just as the Espionage and
Sedition Acts had been used to target political dissenters and immigrants,
the Smith Act became a primary tool for prosecuting calm anists.
In ninety eight, eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA
(08:05):
were tried and convicted under the Smith Act. They hadn't
been directly advocating for the overthrow of the U S government,
but they had been teaching from works by Karl Marx
and Vladimir Lenin that described the revolutionary overthrow of governments
as necessary. The Supreme Court upheld these convictions and Dennis
(08:25):
versus the United States in nineteen fifty one, and this
court decision moved the country away from an earlier standard
that required evidence of a clear and present danger in
order to justify the government placing limits on free speech.
The focus on communism escalated during the Cold War. World
War two had left the US and the USS are
(08:46):
as the two remaining superpowers, and at first the US
was the only one with nuclear weapons, but the Soviet
Union detonated its first to nuclear device in nineteen forty nine,
and soon it became clear that spies had been at
work within the US nuclear program. This sparked an increasing
fixation on the idea that Soviet agents were infiltrating the
(09:08):
United States, including through the US Communist Party. There was
also a more general fear of Communist infiltration, regardless of
whether a particular person or organization had ties back to
the Soviet Union. The House un American Activities Committee had
been established in nineteen thirty eight to investigate suspected disloyalty,
(09:28):
including ties to communism, during the Cold War. The committee's
activities became notorious under the direction of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
This was all part of the Second Red Scare, which
was another national panic, this time focused on the idea
of Communist infiltration. This panic grew out of the tensions
between the US and the U. S s R, and
(09:50):
it was further inflamed by other events like the Chinese
Communist Revolution which started in nineteen forty nine and the
Korean War which started in nineteen fifty. To be clear,
some of the people targeted by the House and American
Activities Committee really were communists or otherwise had ties to
the Communist Party, and there were some communists who really
(10:11):
did have ties back to the Soviet Union and its leadership,
even to the point of spying on the US or
expressing overt loyalty to the Soviet Union and its leadership.
But the overall paranoia was disproportionate to the actual level
of threat or the number of Communists who had ties
to the U. S s R. That also went way
beyond communism and started targeting more general political activity and dissent.
(10:37):
The Communist Party had advocated for things like labor rights,
civil rights, and women's rights, and that made it really
easy to brand anyone who fought for these same causes
as a communist, as McCarthy, Hoover, and other public figures
stoked existing fear and paranoia, the government and private organizations
tried to purge themselves of anyone deemed to be disloyal
(10:59):
or a security threat for any reason, for example, anyone
who might be susceptible to blackmail, and the national climate
was one of suspicion, repression, and fear. By early nineteen
fifty four, McCarthy's support was starting to wane because of
his aggressive tactics with the Committee. I can't remember now
if we mentioned this already, but they're are also has
(11:21):
yet another two parter on this back in the archive.
After he accused several Army officers of having Communist ties,
his own behavior was investigated, and the Senate voted to
condemn his conduct on December two of nineteen fifty four.
Although the House an American Activities Committee still existed, its
prominence and its reputation declined through the late nineteen fifties
(11:42):
and sixties. In a lot of ways, the FBI's co
Intel Prose picked up where the House on American Activities
Committee left off. And we're going to talk more about
that after we paused for a sponsor break. The FBI
and the House an American Activities Committee were actively working
(12:05):
together during the McCarthy era, but the FBI didn't really
publicize what it was doing or try to promote the
overall idea that communists had infiltrated a lot of American institutions,
particularly Hollywood. It left that to the Committee, whose activities
were publicly known and reported in the press. One of
the papers that I read while researching all of this
(12:25):
described the FBI during this time as laundering its intelligence
and counterintelligence activities through the House an American Activities Committee.
So when the House an American Activities Committee came under
scrutiny in nineteen fifty four, its own activities declined, but
the FBI's related work did not. Instead, J Edgar Hoover
(12:48):
drew on the Communist Control Act of nineteen fifty four
or quote, an act to outlaw the Communist Party, to
prohibit members of communist organizations from serving in certain represented
of capacities, and for other purposes nice and specific there uh.
This Act banned the Communist Party of the United States,
framing it not as a legitimate political party, but as
(13:11):
a conspiracy to overthrow the government. This law came out
of the same ongoing fear and suspicion of communism, and
it also connected specifically to the labor movement. There was
some overlap between the Communist Party and union organizers, and
the acts specifically banned members of the Communist Party from
holding office and labor organizations. This was purportedly to protect
(13:35):
unsuspecting workers from Communist subversion, but really it granted the
government a lot of leeway to investigate labor organizations and
to invalidate their collective bargaining agreements if they were determined
to be Communist infiltrated. Hoover interpreted the Communist Control Act
as giving the FBI broad authority to investigate and proactively
(13:57):
disrupt communist threats in the U S and when the
Bureau started these counter intelligence programs, at first the focus
was on communism. The first formal co intel pro built
on ongoing counter intelligence efforts that targeted communists. It was
called co Intel Pro Communist Party USA or cp U
(14:19):
s A, and that was launched in nineteen fifty six.
This formal co intel pro grew out of a series
of field conferences that were held that year as suspected
communists had been brought to trial under the Smith Act.
The FBI's informants from within the Communist Party had been
exposed when they were brought in to testify in court.
(14:40):
These field conferences were held in part to figure out
how the Bureau could recruit new informants. A counter intelligence
program was recommended as a way to keep targeting communists
while recruiting new informants. Shortly after the FBI established co
intel pro Communist Party USA, the U. S. Supreme Court
partially reversed its earlier decision in Dennis versus the United States.
(15:04):
This time the decision was in Yates v. United States.
The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that
radical reactionary speech was protected under the First Amendment. People
could talk about revolution and overthrowing the government in the abstract,
and that was protected speech unless it posed a clear
and present danger. Thus overturned the convictions of fourteen people
(15:28):
who had been charged with violating the Smith Act. On
the same day, the Supreme Court also issued two other
decisions in cases involving communism and members of the Communist Party,
and both cases protected their rights to things like privacy
and due process. These Supreme Court decisions were the first
of a series that overturned or narrowed the focus of
(15:49):
laws that had been providing the foundation for the FBI's
activities against suspected communists. The FBI argued that these court
rulings left them with no other choice but to fight
communism through covert counter intelligence, so by the time the
cointl pros were uncovered and investigated, more than half of
all the proposed operations had been aimed at the Communist
(16:11):
Party USA. The FBI carried out one thousand, three hight
eight separate documented efforts against the Communist Party, whose membership
went from twenty two thousand in the early nineteen fifties
to three thousand by nineteen fifty seven. But the focus
expanded out from communism. Co intel pro CPUs A targeted
(16:33):
communists and suspected communists, and then organizations that had Communists
among their members, and then organizations that were maybe tangentially
connected to suspected communists, and then organizations whose purpose and
goals had some common themes with the Communist Party even
if there were no Communists involved, And then the definition
(16:55):
of communism expanded to include pretty much anything that the
Bureau considered to be subversive. Coencal pro Cpo SA also
included counterintelligence operations against civil rights activists, initially because of
known or suspected ties to communism. For example, Stanley David
Levison was a friend and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.
(17:17):
And he had also been one of the major financiers
of the communist part of USA. But this targeting of
civil rights activist was not just about actual connections to communism.
Was also because the Bureau saw civil rights work in
the US in general as a subversive threat. So as
coencal pro Cpo s A expanded, the FBI put intense
(17:41):
efforts into discrediting and disrupting civil rights organizations. The FBI
repeatedly broke into civil rights organizations offices to steal documents,
and got the I r S to start spurious audits
of civil rights leaders. In nineteen sixty four, the FBI
sent an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King June year,
supposedly written by an anonymous black person, calling him quote
(18:05):
a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that
This letter was accompanied by an audio recording purportedly documenting
evidence of King's extramarital affairs. It ended by saying that
there was quote only one thing left for you to do.
The implication was that King should take his own life,
and it said he had thirty four days to do it,
(18:27):
that deadline being the day he was due to accept
the Nobel Peace Prize. So those are just examples of
the targeting of civil rights groups. And as the focus
of co intel pro CPUSA expanded, the Bureau also started
establishing other separate counterintelligence programs. When a Senate committee investigated
the US government's intelligence operations starting in ninety five, we're
(18:50):
going to talk about that in Part two. They found
five specific named FBI co intel pros, including co intel
pro Communist Party USA. The next cointell pro Socialist Workers
Party started in nineteen sixty one. This one was short lived.
There's a whole bunch of freedom of information acts stuff
(19:10):
on the FBI website, and this one only has like
three pages are three lengths of stuff to go through,
like the other ones have sometimes twenty and thirty and
multiple pages of links to go through. So we're not
covering that one in as much detail. But one of
the things that the Bureau routinely did was to target
Socialist Workers Party members who were running for public office
(19:31):
to undermine their political campaigns. In nineteen sixty four, the
bureau launched co Intel pro White Hate, co Intel pro
Black Nationalist Slash Hate groups started in nineteen sixty seven,
and co Intel pro New Left started in nineteen sixty eight.
Other counterintelligence programs were also unearthed later on, with targets
(19:52):
that included the American Indian Movement and Puerto Rican independence activists. Ostensibly,
the goals of all these counter intelligence programs were to
protect national security and to prevent violence, and to do
that the FBI would quote expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or
otherwise neutralize its targets. The one exception was coin cell
(20:15):
pro White Hate, and with that the FBI was focused
on curbing white nationalist violence rather than neutralizing the targeted
groups altogether, which was more the focus and the other
coin cel pros we're going to get to more about
that in a bit. At the same time, even though
the FBI was purportedly preventing violence, some of these operations
(20:36):
incited violence. For example, the FBI tried to start or
escalate violent disputes between the black Panthers and street gangs
operating in the same areas. As another example, it's not
clear whether the FBI played a direct part in the
assassination of Malcolm X, but the Bureau definitely stoked the
divisions and disputes within the Nation of Islam that led
(20:59):
to his assassination. Another Bureau effort that was unearthed later
was Operation Hoodwink, which was an effort to quote evoke
a dispute between CPUSA and LaCOSA Nostra, in other words,
to try to start a war between the Communist Party
in the Sicilian mafia. And beyond these ideas of national
security and violence prevention, these programs also worked to maintain
(21:23):
the existing social and political order in the United States.
These co intel pros, many of them targeted organizations that
were not violent and did not threaten national security, but
they did advocate for changes big and small and how
the country operated or treated its residents and citizens, especially
women and people of color. Although there was some variation
(21:44):
from one to another, which we will get into, the
Bureau tended to use similar tactics all across all of
these various counterintelligence programs. Most of these tactics came from
counterintelligence work that had been carried out in foreign countries
during wartime with outcomes that the FBI considered to be successful.
In other words, the United States had honed these techniques
(22:07):
against its enemies during wartime, and then the FBI started
using them in the US against its own citizens. To
quote the Church Committee report, which followed a Senate investigation
into US intelligence activities. Quote, the techniques were adopted wholesale
from wartime counter intelligence and ranged from the trivial mailing
(22:27):
reprints of readers digest articles to college administrators to the
degrading sending anonymous poison pen letters intending to break up marriages,
and the dangerous encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members
of violent groups as police informers. So the bureau relied
on informants, surveillance, and other investigative tools to get information
(22:50):
about organizations, their activities, and their members. This included everything
from conducting interviews to opening and photo copying people's mail,
you breaking into organizations offices to tap phones and copy documents.
Then it used that information to create division, distrust, and dissent.
Sometimes the interviews themselves did that work. Interviewing members of
(23:14):
an organization to make others suspect they were informants, or
conducting multiple simultaneous interviews to make people think that their
organization had been infiltrated. One specific tactic used to breed
distrust was called snitch jacketing, also known as bad jacketing,
which involved using things like planted evidence and faked communications
(23:34):
to make it seem like a loyal member of an
organization was really an FBI informant. In some cases, FBI
informants planted the suspicion that loyal members were informants to
shift the focus off of themselves, and the FBI used
this tactic within organizations that had a reputation for violence,
as mentioned earlier, even though that carried the real potential
(23:55):
for the targeted member to be assassinated or otherwise harmed.
The Bureau all so called people's parents, employers, landlords, and
universities to inform them of their involvement in targeted organizations
to try to get them fired, evicted, or expelled. Many
of the targets of co intel pro New Left were
college students, and the FBI either contacted their parents to
(24:18):
tell them about their children's purportedly subversive activities or they
faked calls from parents to students haranguing them for their
political activity. The FBI also created and distributed published material
that was meant to discredit their targets, and they fed
news stories, sometimes real and sometimes fabricated, to the media.
(24:39):
FBI informants gave media interviews in which they intentionally tried
to make the organizations they were purportedly representing look as
bad as possible, whether it was through using loaded rhetoric
or emphasizing a group's most controversial viewpoints, or just seeming unhinged.
The FBI also paid informants to make false state mints,
(25:00):
for example, paying informants who were part of non violent
organizations to make public calls for violence. In some cases,
the bureau even set up local branches of an organization,
with the branches entire membership being made up completely of informants,
or they set up new fictitious organizations whose members were
(25:20):
all informants so that they could work against their actual targets.
The FBI also outed gay people and spread rumors about
people's sexual orientations, regardless of what their sexual orientation actually was.
They made postcards and mailed them to people's homes like
for example, a card that said quote thank you for
(25:40):
your successful participation in anti establishment and anti military Industrial
complex activities, and those were sent to college students parental addresses.
During co intel pro New Left, the Bureau used postcards
specifically so that mail carriers, other members of a target's household,
and others could also see the messaging, and so the
(26:03):
intended target would wonder who else might have seen it.
Although most of these tactics were used across all the
different counterintelligence programs, they weren't used identically or to the
same extent from one to another. For example, the FBI
didn't really create a lot of false documents to drive
negative publicity for the Ku Klux Klan under cointell pro
(26:23):
White Hate. It didn't really need to, since the Ku
Klux Klan's activities included openly harassing and murdering civil rights activists.
As another example, the FBI also used tactics that had
the potential to cause really serious physical, emotional, or economic
harm during coin cell pro black nationalists hate groups, but
(26:43):
really rarely used similar tactics when they were working in
cointell pro White Hate. Although the FBI was fairly insulated
from other government departments, which is how it was able
to carry out these kinds of programs for so long.
It also pulled in other departments in bureaus. As part
of this work, the FBI leaked real and false information
(27:05):
to the i r S, prompting audits of civil rights
leaders and other targets, essentially using the i r S
to harass people. It did the same with local police,
leading to things like police harassment, arrests, false charges, and
just a selective enforcement of existing laws depending on who
the FBI thought deserved to be prosecuted. Basically, all these
(27:26):
efforts combined investigation, disinformation, psychological warfare, and harassment to try
to destroy organizations that the FBI thought were threatening or,
in the case of coin cell pro white hate, to
just try to curb those organizations violence rather than trying
to neutralize them altogether. And all of this the FBI's
focus was on whether what it was doing was effective,
(27:50):
not on whether these tactics were constitutional or otherwise legal.
According to the FBI, co intel pro operations were a
tiny proportion of its overall work between nineteen fifty six
and nineteen seventy one, quote about two tenths of one
percent of the FBI's workload over a fifteen year period.
At the same time, more than fifty thousand pages of
(28:12):
co intel pro documents were released to the public. Starting
in the nineteen seventies, a Senate investigation concluded that the
FBI had carried out two thousand, three hundred seventies separate
counterintelligence actions, with almost one thousand additional actions being proposed
but not carried out. More were unearthed. Later on, we're
going to talk about coincal pro white hate, which, as
(28:35):
we've noted, as kind of an outlier in all of this.
After a quick sponsor break, the FBI established most of
its cointal prose because I believe that the people and
organizations that it was targeting were a threat. Overwhelmingly, these
(28:55):
targets were on the political left. They were people in
groups who were advocating for things like civil rights, black liberation,
women's liberation, pacifism, socialism, communism, nuclear disarmament, and an end
to the US involvement in the Vietnam War, things like that.
As we noted at the top of the show, there
were exceptions, but most of the time the people and
(29:17):
organizations being targeted weren't violent threats. Even organizations that weren't
specifically non violent. A lot of the time, we're focused
on defending themselves with violence if necessary, not on instigating violence,
or in some cases there were individual members of an
organization that were involved in violence while the organization itself
(29:37):
was not. Co Intel Pro White Hate started on July
four and in many ways it was an outlier when
compared to the other co intel pros. Most of the
other programs shifted and expanded over time, and some of
them were particularly vague. For example, in co Intel pro
New Left, the FBI did not have a precise definition
(29:58):
for what New Left and ment, but co Intel pro
White Hate was focused on white supremacist groups, especially the
Ku Klux Klan, and it kept that focus throughout its
whole existence. The Ku Klux Klan has been through a
few iterations in the United States, and it surged in
popularity during the Civil Rights movement, with its members fighting
(30:19):
against integration and terrorizing black people in other communities, using
everything from cross burnings to murder. Coincil pro White Hate
targeted seven Team Ku Klux Klan organizations and nine other
hate groups, including the American Nazi Party. Another big difference
is that many of the other co intel pros were
focused on organizations that were challenging the status quo. The
(30:43):
Ku Klux Klan and other targeted hate groups, on the
other hand, were maintaining the status quo by upholding segregation, racism,
and white supremacy. They harassed, threatened, and murdered integrationists and
civil rights workers, primarily in the Southern United States. In general,
members of these organizations were also Christian, anti communist, intensely patriotic,
(31:06):
and supportive of both local and federal law enforcement. So,
unlike with the other co intel pros, the FBI's goal
wasn't to totally neutralize these groups. It was just to
curb their violence and prevent that violence from spreading to
other groups. The FBI also took the initiative to launch
its othern coincal pros based on its own assessments of
(31:27):
what constituted a threat, But coincal pro white hate followed
intense pressure from outside the bureau, including from President London
Baines Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Current and
former Klansman and other white supremacists had carried out a
whole series of murders and other acts of violence has
(31:48):
included the nineteen six Street Baptist church bonding, which killed
fourteen year olds Addie mccollins, Denise McNair and Carol Robertson
and eleven year old Cynthia Wesley. Also included the nineteen
sixty three murder of Medgar Evers and the nineteen sixty
four murders of civil rights activists Michael Schwermer, Andrew Goodman,
(32:08):
and James Cheney. After coin Cell pro white Hate started,
members of the clan also murdered Violet Luzo, and one
of the participants in that murder might have been a
paid FBI informant. The FBI was criticized for failing to
prevent or intervene in any of this, something that the
Bureau had argued was not part of its jurisdiction, but
(32:29):
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four had guaranteed
black Americans equal protection under the law in a number
of different contexts, which made it hard for the FBI
to continue that argument. Coin Cell pro white hate ben
served several purposes for the FBI. It allowed the bureau
to demonstrate for the President and the Attorney General that
it was doing something to investigate these crimes at the
(32:51):
same time, by using covert counter intelligence, the FBI could
do most of this work in secret without alienating or
antagonize things Southern law enforcement, many of whom tacitly allowed
the Ku Klex Klan and other hate groups to operate
in their area or actively participated. As a side note,
when j Edgar Hoover said quote Dr. Martin Loser King
(33:14):
is the most notorious liar in the country in nineteen
sixty four, that was in response to King's criticisms that
the Bureau was too friendly with Southern segregationists and that
the Southern FBI agents were not taking threats to Black
Americans seriously. The FBI used a lot of the types
of tactics that we discussed earlier in the episode during
(33:35):
co and cel pro white hate. As we noted earlier,
the Bureau didn't really need to create materials to try
to bring bad pr to the clan because the clan
was doing a lot of that work for them. The
FBI publicized not only their hate crimes, but also other
crimes committed by clan leaders and members, including things like
embezzlement and attempting to arrange marriages between clan members and
(33:58):
underage girls. The SBI also publicly identified clan leaders, including
leaking their names to the press who published critical articles
and satirical editorial cartoons. After the House on American Activities
Committee held hearings on the clan, something that the committee
was pressured to take on, the FBI released those findings
(34:18):
to the press as well. The FBI also worked to
so distrust within these organizations. They sent thousands of postcards
to clan members that either implied or a flat out
said that the government had infiltrated the organization or that
accused KKK leaders of fraud or other wrongdoing. Postcards said
things like clansmen, trying to hide your identity behind your sheet?
(34:42):
You received this, someone knows who you are. Once again,
these postcards served multiple purposes to make clan members think
the organization had been infiltrated, to make them wonder how
many other people had seen that postcard on its way
to them, and to make it possible for other people
in including postal workers, to see that the target was
(35:02):
in the clan. During coin Cell pro White Hate, the
Bureau created the National Committee for Domestic Tranquility, which sent
letters and other materials to clan members to stoke dissent
and spread rumors about informants. They printed accusations that clan
leaders were the Antichrist and kind of a weird irony.
(35:23):
The FBI, which because we've talked about, was really focused
on undermining communism, tried to undermine clan membership by spreading
rumors that communists had infiltrated the organizations. The organization itself
was fiercely anti Communist. Some of the operations were almost bizarre.
In one instance, the FBI collected the charred remnants of
(35:45):
a cross that the clan had burned and then had
it delivered by courier to a clan meeting, hoping to
reinforce the idea that not only had someone known about
the cross burning and who was behind it, but that
they also knew when and where the group gathered. Is
not clear how effective this was. According to the book
(36:06):
that I was reading about this um, they took it
outside and tried to light it on fire again. The
targeted hate groups naturally realized that they had informants in
their midst Some turned towards requiring lie detector tests and
questioning people under the effects of sodium pentahal to try
to determine whether a person was loyal. It is not
clear whether co Intel pro white hate thwarted white supremacist violence,
(36:31):
but overall membership in the clan did drop during these years,
from an estimated fourteen to fifteen thousand members before co
Intel pro to four thousand, three hundred in nineteen seventy one.
It does also seem that public perceptions of the clan
shifted during these same years, with more people, especially more
white people, seeing the Clan and similar hate groups as
(36:54):
violent and unstable and mentally connecting the clan to Nazis.
Some white sub earned leaders who had tacitly or directly
approved of the clans activities gradually distanced themselves during the
Bureau's operations. So in the next episode, we're going to
talk more about some of the other co and Tell pros,
including intense targeting of the Black Panthers, and we'll also
(37:17):
talk about, honestly, one of my favorite parts of this
whole story, which is how these programs were finally exposed.
That is a very very good story. So good do
you have in the realm of good stories? I hope
a listener mail I do I do? This is from uh,
I think this name is pronounced Leah. I'm very sorry
if I have said it wrong. Leah says, Hello, Holly
(37:38):
and Tracy. Thank you for all the great subjects to
cover in your episodes. I enjoy listening whenever my toddler
allows me to. I never thought I'd be sending you
an email, but the episode on the history of beekeeping
changed my mind. My grandparents lived in Oregon in an
old depost station building that was converted into a home.
The building still exists as far as I know, but
(37:58):
as a child, I visit of this building, which was
then the home of a real estate business, and what
was once the kitchen my grandparents had an observation beehive.
The beehive was still there when I visited as a child,
but the room was no longer a kitchen. This home
has some history because, as the story was told in
my family, my grandfather used some dynamite to remove plaster
(38:20):
off the walls when doing some home renovation. It did
just that and split a hole in the corner of
the house. I don't remember my grandparents very well. They
died when I was very young. Your episode on beekeeping
reminded me of them, as a side note, I grew
up with my father keeping bees in our lot in California.
We kept them at the very back of the lot
in the chicken coop. I grew up chewing on the
(38:41):
honeycomb caps that were sliced off the honeycomb itself with
a hot knife. We collected so much honey that I
don't think we ever bought honey for twenty years later, however,
when my mom passed away and we had to clean
out and sell her house, we found some honey containers
that had leaked and left stains on the cement floor
of the basement. I don't think the new owners will
ever guess that the stain was cast by honey. Thanks
(39:02):
again for your great storytelling and unlocking the world beyond
my home during this time. Leah. Ps, I know you
like really long titles. I hope the long subject line
catches your attention. UM, and this subject line, for everyone's delight,
is observation be hive in the kitchen, dynamite for home
reno and honey stains on cement floor. So thank you
(39:24):
so much for this email, Leah. I hope everybody, as
we've said before, is is just keeping themselves as safe
as it's possible to do. I know, stuff is still
really hard for everyone, and you know, particularly hard for
the people that UM are are facing multiple, multiple crises
(39:46):
that are unfolding at the same time. UM So, thank
you everyone for listening, Thank you Leah for this email.
If you would like to write to us on this
or any other podcast, or at history Podcasts at i
heart radio dot com. You can also find us on
social media as missed in History. That's our our name
on the sites that we used, and you can subscribe
(40:07):
to our show in the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
and anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff you Missed
in 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.
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 Frying. Something that
has come up several times on our show is FBI
surveillance of people who were associated with the civil rights
(00:23):
movement in the United States. Most recently, we talked about
the bureau creating this file on James Baldwin that was
more than seventeen hundred pages long, and in earlier episodes,
we've talked about things like the FBI using wire taps
to spy on Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.
A lot of this surveillance was connected to a series
(00:43):
of counterintelligence programs or Cohen's hell pros that primarily targeted
left wing organizations and people in the US from nineteen
fifty six until nineteen seventy one. The FBI framed this
as work that was necessary to prevent violence and protect
national purity, But a whole lot of the people and
organizations that they targeted, we're not violent and we're not
(01:05):
threatening national security. Mostly they were just threatening the status quo,
and the FBI pursued the one co intel pro that
really really was focused on violent organizations with a totally
different end in mind than what it pursued with the
other operations. Um, this is one of those topics that
includes a whole lot of history that is just a
(01:26):
complicated tangle, So we're gonna tackle it in two parts. Today,
we'll talk about the history of the FBI, especially as
it related to communism and perceived subversive threats, because all
that fed directly into co Intel Pro. We're also going
to give an overview of the types of tactics that
the FBI used across these various programs, and we're going
(01:48):
to talk about the one co intel pro that was
kind of an outlier in all of this, which was
co Intel Pro White Hate. Next time, we will get
into some of the specifics of the co intel pros
that geted black liberation organizations and the new Left, as
well as how these programs were finally exposed to the public.
The investigation team that would become the US Federal Bureau
(02:10):
of Investigation was established in nineteen o eight, and at
first this was a small group of newly hired investigators
who worked for the Department of Justice under the Office
of the Chief Examiner. Before this point, when the Department
of Justice needed investigators, it had either hired private investigators
or borrowed investigators from other departments. In nineteen o nine,
(02:32):
the Office of the Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau
of Investigation. The Bureau's work involved enforcing federal law and
helping to protect the nation from threats. In nineteen seventeen,
just after the US entered World War One, Congress passed
the Espionage Act, or an Act to punish acts of
interference with foreign relations, the neutrality of the foreign commerce
(02:55):
of the United States, to punish espionage and better to
enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for
other purposes. The Bureau of Investigation had become the government's
largest investigative agency, and it was tasked with enforcing the
Espionage Act. The Bureau of Investigation also had an assortment
of other duties, including guarding the US border with Mexico
(03:17):
during the Mexican Revolution. The same year that the Espionage
Act was passed, j Edgar Hoover joined the Department of Justice.
The following year, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which expanded
the Espionage Act to focus on anti war activists and socialists.
The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to quote, willfully, utter, print, rite,
(03:39):
or publish any disloyal, profane, scureless, or abusive language about
the form of the government of the United States. It
also outlawed urging, inciting, or advocating any curtailment or reduction
in the production of war material. Then, in nineteen nineteen
U s. Attorney General amish Will Palmer his home was bombed.
(04:01):
This was part of a series of male bombings carried
out that year, with seven other bombings happening on that
same night. We have a two part episode on the
bombings and the massive series of raids and deportations that followed,
and that two parter originally came out in twenties sixteen.
J Edgar Hoover led a team to investigate these bombings,
and the espionage and Sedition Acts were a big part
(04:24):
of it. The raids, incarcerations, and deportations that followed became
known as the Palmer Raids and they were part of
the first Red Scare, which was a widespread fear of Bolshevists, anarchists, socialists,
and immigrants as a threat to American life and national
security by Attorney General Palmer's handling of these investigations had
(04:46):
come under intense scrutiny from both within and outside of
the US government. On May of that year, a team
of twelve lawyers issued a report on the raids. Mr
report detailed cruel and unusual punishments, arrests without warrant, unreasonable
search as in seizures, compelling persons to witness against themselves,
propaganda by the Department of Justice, and provocative agents, which
(05:10):
were basically operatives who entrapped people. Palmer's reputation suffered as
a result of all this, and he returned to private
practice after failing to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
William J. Flynn was director of the Bureau of Investigation
at the time, and soon he was replaced as well.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts were repealed in nineteen twenty
(05:32):
and ninety one, but Hoover's reputation wasn't really tarnished by
his involvement in all this. Soon he was being groomed
to take over the Bureau. J. Edgar Hoover became the
Bureau of Investigations director in nineteen twenty four, and the
Bureau was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in nineteen
thirty five. Of course, there is a ton of history
(05:55):
between when Hoover joined the Department of Justice and when
the FBI started its co into prose. Hoover was involved
in modernizing and standardizing the FBI, and the bureau itself
was involved in investigating organized crime during prohibition. During World
War Two, the FBI also maintained lists of Japanese, German,
(06:15):
and Italian nationals believed to be a threat to domestic
security and kept those people under surveillance. Then, of course,
Japanese immigrants and their American born descendants were incarcerated under
Executive Order ninety sixty six. That is also covered any
previous two parter of the podcast. The Central Intelligence Agency
(06:35):
was founded in nineteen forty seven to focus on foreign intelligence.
That left the FBI to focus on domestic intelligence and
on investigating federal crimes. This creation of the CIA happened
under the National Security Act of nineteen forty seven, and
that act also included this definition of counter intelligence quote
information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other
(07:01):
intelligence activities, sabotage or assassinations conducted by or on behalf
of foreign governments or elements thereof foreign organizations or foreign persons,
or international terrorist activities. A big part of this same
time span was the fight against communism. Following a precedent
that had been set by the Palmer Aids, the First
(07:23):
Red Scare, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts, in nineteen forty,
Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, also known as the
Smith Act, and this act included clauses that made it
illegal for any citizen or resident of the US to quote, advocate,
a bet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or
(07:43):
propriety of overthrowing, or destroying any government in the United
States by force or violence. Just as the Espionage and
Sedition Acts had been used to target political dissenters and immigrants,
the Smith Act became a primary tool for prosecuting calm anists.
In ninety eight, eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA
(08:05):
were tried and convicted under the Smith Act. They hadn't
been directly advocating for the overthrow of the U S government,
but they had been teaching from works by Karl Marx
and Vladimir Lenin that described the revolutionary overthrow of governments
as necessary. The Supreme Court upheld these convictions and Dennis
(08:25):
versus the United States in nineteen fifty one, and this
court decision moved the country away from an earlier standard
that required evidence of a clear and present danger in
order to justify the government placing limits on free speech.
The focus on communism escalated during the Cold War. World
War two had left the US and the USS are
(08:46):
as the two remaining superpowers, and at first the US
was the only one with nuclear weapons, but the Soviet
Union detonated its first to nuclear device in nineteen forty nine,
and soon it became clear that spies had been at
work within the US nuclear program. This sparked an increasing
fixation on the idea that Soviet agents were infiltrating the
(09:08):
United States, including through the US Communist Party. There was
also a more general fear of Communist infiltration, regardless of
whether a particular person or organization had ties back to
the Soviet Union. The House un American Activities Committee had
been established in nineteen thirty eight to investigate suspected disloyalty,
(09:28):
including ties to communism, during the Cold War. The committee's
activities became notorious under the direction of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
This was all part of the Second Red Scare, which
was another national panic, this time focused on the idea
of Communist infiltration. This panic grew out of the tensions
between the US and the U. S s R, and
(09:50):
it was further inflamed by other events like the Chinese
Communist Revolution which started in nineteen forty nine and the
Korean War which started in nineteen fifty. To be clear,
some of the people targeted by the House and American
Activities Committee really were communists or otherwise had ties to
the Communist Party, and there were some communists who really
(10:11):
did have ties back to the Soviet Union and its leadership,
even to the point of spying on the US or
expressing overt loyalty to the Soviet Union and its leadership.
But the overall paranoia was disproportionate to the actual level
of threat or the number of Communists who had ties
to the U. S s R. That also went way
beyond communism and started targeting more general political activity and dissent.
(10:37):
The Communist Party had advocated for things like labor rights,
civil rights, and women's rights, and that made it really
easy to brand anyone who fought for these same causes
as a communist, as McCarthy, Hoover, and other public figures
stoked existing fear and paranoia, the government and private organizations
tried to purge themselves of anyone deemed to be disloyal
(10:59):
or a security threat for any reason, for example, anyone
who might be susceptible to blackmail, and the national climate
was one of suspicion, repression, and fear. By early nineteen
fifty four, McCarthy's support was starting to wane because of
his aggressive tactics with the Committee. I can't remember now
if we mentioned this already, but they're are also has
(11:21):
yet another two parter on this back in the archive.
After he accused several Army officers of having Communist ties,
his own behavior was investigated, and the Senate voted to
condemn his conduct on December two of nineteen fifty four.
Although the House an American Activities Committee still existed, its
prominence and its reputation declined through the late nineteen fifties
(11:42):
and sixties. In a lot of ways, the FBI's co
Intel Prose picked up where the House on American Activities
Committee left off. And we're going to talk more about
that after we paused for a sponsor break. The FBI
and the House an American Activities Committee were actively working
(12:05):
together during the McCarthy era, but the FBI didn't really
publicize what it was doing or try to promote the
overall idea that communists had infiltrated a lot of American institutions,
particularly Hollywood. It left that to the Committee, whose activities
were publicly known and reported in the press. One of
the papers that I read while researching all of this
(12:25):
described the FBI during this time as laundering its intelligence
and counterintelligence activities through the House an American Activities Committee.
So when the House an American Activities Committee came under
scrutiny in nineteen fifty four, its own activities declined, but
the FBI's related work did not. Instead, J Edgar Hoover
(12:48):
drew on the Communist Control Act of nineteen fifty four
or quote, an act to outlaw the Communist Party, to
prohibit members of communist organizations from serving in certain represented
of capacities, and for other purposes nice and specific there uh.
This Act banned the Communist Party of the United States,
framing it not as a legitimate political party, but as
(13:11):
a conspiracy to overthrow the government. This law came out
of the same ongoing fear and suspicion of communism, and
it also connected specifically to the labor movement. There was
some overlap between the Communist Party and union organizers, and
the acts specifically banned members of the Communist Party from
holding office and labor organizations. This was purportedly to protect
(13:35):
unsuspecting workers from Communist subversion, but really it granted the
government a lot of leeway to investigate labor organizations and
to invalidate their collective bargaining agreements if they were determined
to be Communist infiltrated. Hoover interpreted the Communist Control Act
as giving the FBI broad authority to investigate and proactively
(13:57):
disrupt communist threats in the U S and when the
Bureau started these counter intelligence programs, at first the focus
was on communism. The first formal co intel pro built
on ongoing counter intelligence efforts that targeted communists. It was
called co Intel Pro Communist Party USA or cp U
(14:19):
s A, and that was launched in nineteen fifty six.
This formal co intel pro grew out of a series
of field conferences that were held that year as suspected
communists had been brought to trial under the Smith Act.
The FBI's informants from within the Communist Party had been
exposed when they were brought in to testify in court.
(14:40):
These field conferences were held in part to figure out
how the Bureau could recruit new informants. A counter intelligence
program was recommended as a way to keep targeting communists
while recruiting new informants. Shortly after the FBI established co
intel pro Communist Party USA, the U. S. Supreme Court
partially reversed its earlier decision in Dennis versus the United States.
(15:04):
This time the decision was in Yates v. United States.
The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that
radical reactionary speech was protected under the First Amendment. People
could talk about revolution and overthrowing the government in the abstract,
and that was protected speech unless it posed a clear
and present danger. Thus overturned the convictions of fourteen people
(15:28):
who had been charged with violating the Smith Act. On
the same day, the Supreme Court also issued two other
decisions in cases involving communism and members of the Communist Party,
and both cases protected their rights to things like privacy
and due process. These Supreme Court decisions were the first
of a series that overturned or narrowed the focus of
(15:49):
laws that had been providing the foundation for the FBI's
activities against suspected communists. The FBI argued that these court
rulings left them with no other choice but to fight
communism through covert counter intelligence, so by the time the
cointl pros were uncovered and investigated, more than half of
all the proposed operations had been aimed at the Communist
(16:11):
Party USA. The FBI carried out one thousand, three hight
eight separate documented efforts against the Communist Party, whose membership
went from twenty two thousand in the early nineteen fifties
to three thousand by nineteen fifty seven. But the focus
expanded out from communism. Co intel pro CPUs A targeted
(16:33):
communists and suspected communists, and then organizations that had Communists
among their members, and then organizations that were maybe tangentially
connected to suspected communists, and then organizations whose purpose and
goals had some common themes with the Communist Party even
if there were no Communists involved, And then the definition
(16:55):
of communism expanded to include pretty much anything that the
Bureau considered to be subversive. Coencal pro Cpo SA also
included counterintelligence operations against civil rights activists, initially because of
known or suspected ties to communism. For example, Stanley David
Levison was a friend and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.
(17:17):
And he had also been one of the major financiers
of the communist part of USA. But this targeting of
civil rights activist was not just about actual connections to communism.
Was also because the Bureau saw civil rights work in
the US in general as a subversive threat. So as
coencal pro Cpo s A expanded, the FBI put intense
(17:41):
efforts into discrediting and disrupting civil rights organizations. The FBI
repeatedly broke into civil rights organizations offices to steal documents,
and got the I r S to start spurious audits
of civil rights leaders. In nineteen sixty four, the FBI
sent an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King June year,
supposedly written by an anonymous black person, calling him quote
(18:05):
a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that
This letter was accompanied by an audio recording purportedly documenting
evidence of King's extramarital affairs. It ended by saying that
there was quote only one thing left for you to do.
The implication was that King should take his own life,
and it said he had thirty four days to do it,
(18:27):
that deadline being the day he was due to accept
the Nobel Peace Prize. So those are just examples of
the targeting of civil rights groups. And as the focus
of co intel pro CPUSA expanded, the Bureau also started
establishing other separate counterintelligence programs. When a Senate committee investigated
the US government's intelligence operations starting in ninety five, we're
(18:50):
going to talk about that in Part two. They found
five specific named FBI co intel pros, including co intel
pro Communist Party USA. The next cointell pro Socialist Workers
Party started in nineteen sixty one. This one was short lived.
There's a whole bunch of freedom of information acts stuff
(19:10):
on the FBI website, and this one only has like
three pages are three lengths of stuff to go through,
like the other ones have sometimes twenty and thirty and
multiple pages of links to go through. So we're not
covering that one in as much detail. But one of
the things that the Bureau routinely did was to target
Socialist Workers Party members who were running for public office
(19:31):
to undermine their political campaigns. In nineteen sixty four, the
bureau launched co Intel pro White Hate, co Intel pro
Black Nationalist Slash Hate groups started in nineteen sixty seven,
and co Intel pro New Left started in nineteen sixty eight.
Other counterintelligence programs were also unearthed later on, with targets
(19:52):
that included the American Indian Movement and Puerto Rican independence activists. Ostensibly,
the goals of all these counter intelligence programs were to
protect national security and to prevent violence, and to do
that the FBI would quote expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or
otherwise neutralize its targets. The one exception was coin cell
(20:15):
pro White Hate, and with that the FBI was focused
on curbing white nationalist violence rather than neutralizing the targeted
groups altogether, which was more the focus and the other
coin cel pros we're going to get to more about
that in a bit. At the same time, even though
the FBI was purportedly preventing violence, some of these operations
(20:36):
incited violence. For example, the FBI tried to start or
escalate violent disputes between the black Panthers and street gangs
operating in the same areas. As another example, it's not
clear whether the FBI played a direct part in the
assassination of Malcolm X, but the Bureau definitely stoked the
divisions and disputes within the Nation of Islam that led
(20:59):
to his assassination. Another Bureau effort that was unearthed later
was Operation Hoodwink, which was an effort to quote evoke
a dispute between CPUSA and LaCOSA Nostra, in other words,
to try to start a war between the Communist Party
in the Sicilian mafia. And beyond these ideas of national
security and violence prevention, these programs also worked to maintain
(21:23):
the existing social and political order in the United States.
These co intel pros, many of them targeted organizations that
were not violent and did not threaten national security, but
they did advocate for changes big and small and how
the country operated or treated its residents and citizens, especially
women and people of color. Although there was some variation
(21:44):
from one to another, which we will get into, the
Bureau tended to use similar tactics all across all of
these various counterintelligence programs. Most of these tactics came from
counterintelligence work that had been carried out in foreign countries
during wartime with outcomes that the FBI considered to be successful.
In other words, the United States had honed these techniques
(22:07):
against its enemies during wartime, and then the FBI started
using them in the US against its own citizens. To
quote the Church Committee report, which followed a Senate investigation
into US intelligence activities. Quote, the techniques were adopted wholesale
from wartime counter intelligence and ranged from the trivial mailing
(22:27):
reprints of readers digest articles to college administrators to the
degrading sending anonymous poison pen letters intending to break up marriages,
and the dangerous encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members
of violent groups as police informers. So the bureau relied
on informants, surveillance, and other investigative tools to get information
(22:50):
about organizations, their activities, and their members. This included everything
from conducting interviews to opening and photo copying people's mail,
you breaking into organizations offices to tap phones and copy documents.
Then it used that information to create division, distrust, and dissent.
Sometimes the interviews themselves did that work. Interviewing members of
(23:14):
an organization to make others suspect they were informants, or
conducting multiple simultaneous interviews to make people think that their
organization had been infiltrated. One specific tactic used to breed
distrust was called snitch jacketing, also known as bad jacketing,
which involved using things like planted evidence and faked communications
(23:34):
to make it seem like a loyal member of an
organization was really an FBI informant. In some cases, FBI
informants planted the suspicion that loyal members were informants to
shift the focus off of themselves, and the FBI used
this tactic within organizations that had a reputation for violence,
as mentioned earlier, even though that carried the real potential
(23:55):
for the targeted member to be assassinated or otherwise harmed.
The Bureau all so called people's parents, employers, landlords, and
universities to inform them of their involvement in targeted organizations
to try to get them fired, evicted, or expelled. Many
of the targets of co intel pro New Left were
college students, and the FBI either contacted their parents to
(24:18):
tell them about their children's purportedly subversive activities or they
faked calls from parents to students haranguing them for their
political activity. The FBI also created and distributed published material
that was meant to discredit their targets, and they fed
news stories, sometimes real and sometimes fabricated, to the media.
(24:39):
FBI informants gave media interviews in which they intentionally tried
to make the organizations they were purportedly representing look as
bad as possible, whether it was through using loaded rhetoric
or emphasizing a group's most controversial viewpoints, or just seeming unhinged.
The FBI also paid informants to make false state mints,
(25:00):
for example, paying informants who were part of non violent
organizations to make public calls for violence. In some cases,
the bureau even set up local branches of an organization,
with the branches entire membership being made up completely of informants,
or they set up new fictitious organizations whose members were
(25:20):
all informants so that they could work against their actual targets.
The FBI also outed gay people and spread rumors about
people's sexual orientations, regardless of what their sexual orientation actually was.
They made postcards and mailed them to people's homes like
for example, a card that said quote thank you for
(25:40):
your successful participation in anti establishment and anti military Industrial
complex activities, and those were sent to college students parental addresses.
During co intel pro New Left, the Bureau used postcards
specifically so that mail carriers, other members of a target's household,
and others could also see the messaging, and so the
(26:03):
intended target would wonder who else might have seen it.
Although most of these tactics were used across all the
different counterintelligence programs, they weren't used identically or to the
same extent from one to another. For example, the FBI
didn't really create a lot of false documents to drive
negative publicity for the Ku Klux Klan under cointell pro
(26:23):
White Hate. It didn't really need to, since the Ku
Klux Klan's activities included openly harassing and murdering civil rights activists.
As another example, the FBI also used tactics that had
the potential to cause really serious physical, emotional, or economic
harm during coin cell pro black nationalists hate groups, but
(26:43):
really rarely used similar tactics when they were working in
cointell pro White Hate. Although the FBI was fairly insulated
from other government departments, which is how it was able
to carry out these kinds of programs for so long.
It also pulled in other departments in bureaus. As part
of this work, the FBI leaked real and false information
(27:05):
to the i r S, prompting audits of civil rights
leaders and other targets, essentially using the i r S
to harass people. It did the same with local police,
leading to things like police harassment, arrests, false charges, and
just a selective enforcement of existing laws depending on who
the FBI thought deserved to be prosecuted. Basically, all these
(27:26):
efforts combined investigation, disinformation, psychological warfare, and harassment to try
to destroy organizations that the FBI thought were threatening or,
in the case of coin cell pro white hate, to
just try to curb those organizations violence rather than trying
to neutralize them altogether. And all of this the FBI's
focus was on whether what it was doing was effective,
(27:50):
not on whether these tactics were constitutional or otherwise legal.
According to the FBI, co intel pro operations were a
tiny proportion of its overall work between nineteen fifty six
and nineteen seventy one, quote about two tenths of one
percent of the FBI's workload over a fifteen year period.
At the same time, more than fifty thousand pages of
(28:12):
co intel pro documents were released to the public. Starting
in the nineteen seventies, a Senate investigation concluded that the
FBI had carried out two thousand, three hundred seventies separate
counterintelligence actions, with almost one thousand additional actions being proposed
but not carried out. More were unearthed. Later on, we're
going to talk about coincal pro white hate, which, as
(28:35):
we've noted, as kind of an outlier in all of this.
After a quick sponsor break, the FBI established most of
its cointal prose because I believe that the people and
organizations that it was targeting were a threat. Overwhelmingly, these
(28:55):
targets were on the political left. They were people in
groups who were advocating for things like civil rights, black liberation,
women's liberation, pacifism, socialism, communism, nuclear disarmament, and an end
to the US involvement in the Vietnam War, things like that.
As we noted at the top of the show, there
were exceptions, but most of the time the people and
(29:17):
organizations being targeted weren't violent threats. Even organizations that weren't
specifically non violent. A lot of the time, we're focused
on defending themselves with violence if necessary, not on instigating violence,
or in some cases there were individual members of an
organization that were involved in violence while the organization itself
(29:37):
was not. Co Intel Pro White Hate started on July
four and in many ways it was an outlier when
compared to the other co intel pros. Most of the
other programs shifted and expanded over time, and some of
them were particularly vague. For example, in co Intel pro
New Left, the FBI did not have a precise definition
(29:58):
for what New Left and ment, but co Intel pro
White Hate was focused on white supremacist groups, especially the
Ku Klux Klan, and it kept that focus throughout its
whole existence. The Ku Klux Klan has been through a
few iterations in the United States, and it surged in
popularity during the Civil Rights movement, with its members fighting
(30:19):
against integration and terrorizing black people in other communities, using
everything from cross burnings to murder. Coincil pro White Hate
targeted seven Team Ku Klux Klan organizations and nine other
hate groups, including the American Nazi Party. Another big difference
is that many of the other co intel pros were
focused on organizations that were challenging the status quo. The
(30:43):
Ku Klux Klan and other targeted hate groups, on the
other hand, were maintaining the status quo by upholding segregation, racism,
and white supremacy. They harassed, threatened, and murdered integrationists and
civil rights workers, primarily in the Southern United States. In general,
members of these organizations were also Christian, anti communist, intensely patriotic,
(31:06):
and supportive of both local and federal law enforcement. So,
unlike with the other co intel pros, the FBI's goal
wasn't to totally neutralize these groups. It was just to
curb their violence and prevent that violence from spreading to
other groups. The FBI also took the initiative to launch
its othern coincal pros based on its own assessments of
(31:27):
what constituted a threat, But coincal pro white hate followed
intense pressure from outside the bureau, including from President London
Baines Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Current and
former Klansman and other white supremacists had carried out a
whole series of murders and other acts of violence has
(31:48):
included the nineteen six Street Baptist church bonding, which killed
fourteen year olds Addie mccollins, Denise McNair and Carol Robertson
and eleven year old Cynthia Wesley. Also included the nineteen
sixty three murder of Medgar Evers and the nineteen sixty
four murders of civil rights activists Michael Schwermer, Andrew Goodman,
(32:08):
and James Cheney. After coin Cell pro white Hate started,
members of the clan also murdered Violet Luzo, and one
of the participants in that murder might have been a
paid FBI informant. The FBI was criticized for failing to
prevent or intervene in any of this, something that the
Bureau had argued was not part of its jurisdiction, but
(32:29):
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four had guaranteed
black Americans equal protection under the law in a number
of different contexts, which made it hard for the FBI
to continue that argument. Coin Cell pro white hate ben
served several purposes for the FBI. It allowed the bureau
to demonstrate for the President and the Attorney General that
it was doing something to investigate these crimes at the
(32:51):
same time, by using covert counter intelligence, the FBI could
do most of this work in secret without alienating or
antagonize things Southern law enforcement, many of whom tacitly allowed
the Ku Klex Klan and other hate groups to operate
in their area or actively participated. As a side note,
when j Edgar Hoover said quote Dr. Martin Loser King
(33:14):
is the most notorious liar in the country in nineteen
sixty four, that was in response to King's criticisms that
the Bureau was too friendly with Southern segregationists and that
the Southern FBI agents were not taking threats to Black
Americans seriously. The FBI used a lot of the types
of tactics that we discussed earlier in the episode during
(33:35):
co and cel pro white hate. As we noted earlier,
the Bureau didn't really need to create materials to try
to bring bad pr to the clan because the clan
was doing a lot of that work for them. The
FBI publicized not only their hate crimes, but also other
crimes committed by clan leaders and members, including things like
embezzlement and attempting to arrange marriages between clan members and
(33:58):
underage girls. The SBI also publicly identified clan leaders, including
leaking their names to the press who published critical articles
and satirical editorial cartoons. After the House on American Activities
Committee held hearings on the clan, something that the committee
was pressured to take on, the FBI released those findings
(34:18):
to the press as well. The FBI also worked to
so distrust within these organizations. They sent thousands of postcards
to clan members that either implied or a flat out
said that the government had infiltrated the organization or that
accused KKK leaders of fraud or other wrongdoing. Postcards said
things like clansmen, trying to hide your identity behind your sheet?
(34:42):
You received this, someone knows who you are. Once again,
these postcards served multiple purposes to make clan members think
the organization had been infiltrated, to make them wonder how
many other people had seen that postcard on its way
to them, and to make it possible for other people
in including postal workers, to see that the target was
(35:02):
in the clan. During coin Cell pro White Hate, the
Bureau created the National Committee for Domestic Tranquility, which sent
letters and other materials to clan members to stoke dissent
and spread rumors about informants. They printed accusations that clan
leaders were the Antichrist and kind of a weird irony.
(35:23):
The FBI, which because we've talked about, was really focused
on undermining communism, tried to undermine clan membership by spreading
rumors that communists had infiltrated the organizations. The organization itself
was fiercely anti Communist. Some of the operations were almost bizarre.
In one instance, the FBI collected the charred remnants of
(35:45):
a cross that the clan had burned and then had
it delivered by courier to a clan meeting, hoping to
reinforce the idea that not only had someone known about
the cross burning and who was behind it, but that
they also knew when and where the group gathered. Is
not clear how effective this was. According to the book
(36:06):
that I was reading about this um, they took it
outside and tried to light it on fire again. The
targeted hate groups naturally realized that they had informants in
their midst Some turned towards requiring lie detector tests and
questioning people under the effects of sodium pentahal to try
to determine whether a person was loyal. It is not
clear whether co Intel pro white hate thwarted white supremacist violence,
(36:31):
but overall membership in the clan did drop during these years,
from an estimated fourteen to fifteen thousand members before co
Intel pro to four thousand, three hundred in nineteen seventy one.
It does also seem that public perceptions of the clan
shifted during these same years, with more people, especially more
white people, seeing the Clan and similar hate groups as
(36:54):
violent and unstable and mentally connecting the clan to Nazis.
Some white sub earned leaders who had tacitly or directly
approved of the clans activities gradually distanced themselves during the
Bureau's operations. So in the next episode, we're going to
talk more about some of the other co and Tell pros,
including intense targeting of the Black Panthers, and we'll also
(37:17):
talk about, honestly, one of my favorite parts of this
whole story, which is how these programs were finally exposed.
That is a very very good story. So good do
you have in the realm of good stories? I hope
a listener mail I do I do? This is from uh,
I think this name is pronounced Leah. I'm very sorry
if I have said it wrong. Leah says, Hello, Holly
(37:38):
and Tracy. Thank you for all the great subjects to
cover in your episodes. I enjoy listening whenever my toddler
allows me to. I never thought I'd be sending you
an email, but the episode on the history of beekeeping
changed my mind. My grandparents lived in Oregon in an
old depost station building that was converted into a home.
The building still exists as far as I know, but
(37:58):
as a child, I visit of this building, which was
then the home of a real estate business, and what
was once the kitchen my grandparents had an observation beehive.
The beehive was still there when I visited as a child,
but the room was no longer a kitchen. This home
has some history because, as the story was told in
my family, my grandfather used some dynamite to remove plaster
(38:20):
off the walls when doing some home renovation. It did
just that and split a hole in the corner of
the house. I don't remember my grandparents very well. They
died when I was very young. Your episode on beekeeping
reminded me of them, as a side note, I grew
up with my father keeping bees in our lot in California.
We kept them at the very back of the lot
in the chicken coop. I grew up chewing on the
(38:41):
honeycomb caps that were sliced off the honeycomb itself with
a hot knife. We collected so much honey that I
don't think we ever bought honey for twenty years later, however,
when my mom passed away and we had to clean
out and sell her house, we found some honey containers
that had leaked and left stains on the cement floor
of the basement. I don't think the new owners will
ever guess that the stain was cast by honey. Thanks
(39:02):
again for your great storytelling and unlocking the world beyond
my home during this time. Leah. Ps, I know you
like really long titles. I hope the long subject line
catches your attention. UM, and this subject line, for everyone's delight,
is observation be hive in the kitchen, dynamite for home
reno and honey stains on cement floor. So thank you
(39:24):
so much for this email, Leah. I hope everybody, as
we've said before, is is just keeping themselves as safe
as it's possible to do. I know, stuff is still
really hard for everyone, and you know, particularly hard for
the people that UM are are facing multiple, multiple crises
(39:46):
that are unfolding at the same time. UM So, thank
you everyone for listening, Thank you Leah for this email.
If you would like to write to us on this
or any other podcast, or at history Podcasts at i
heart radio dot com. You can also find us on
social media as missed in History. That's our our name
on the sites that we used, and you can subscribe
(40:07):
to our show in the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
and anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff you Missed
in 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.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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