Masters of Deceit

In the space of a couple of years during the early seventies, Peter Bohmer, a professor at San Diego State University, was repeatedly threatened, shot at, and had his office firebombed as a result of his anti-war activities. After being arrested for demonstrating Bohmer was hounded from his job and confined to a hospital for the criminally insane for observation. Later a local court ordered him to leave California because of his record of arrests at demonstrations. Though the local police cooperated enthusiastically, the architect of the harassment campaign against Bohmer was an FBI informant in a right-wing terrorist group known as the Secret Army Organization. Bohmer's experience was only one of the more ghastly results of COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program)--a secret campaign waged by the FBI to disrupt radical organizations through illegal means.

COINTELPRO first came to light as a result of the March 1971 burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pa., by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The files seized in that raid revealed that the bureau spent an extremely large proportion of its time attempting to monitor, infiltrate, and disrupt radical groups in the Philadelphia area. Focusing particular attention on student anti-war activity and on the Black Panthers, the FBI employed such tactics as unauthorized wiretaps, mail openings, and disseminating fraudulent anonymous letters to discredit radical groups, much like Howard Hunt's Kennedy-Diem telegram.

Most of our knowledge about COINTELPRO comes from documents pried out of the FBI after successful lawsuits by NBC reporter Carl Stern and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the target of a major disruption campaign. These SWP documents, published as COINTELPRO are fairly narrowly confined to the FBI's campaign against the SWP, as might well be expected, but they seem to allow a reasonable general portrait of COINTELPRO to be reconstructed.

The disruption program against the SWP, begun in 1961, was modelled on the COINTELPRO campaign against the Communist party which covertly extended the anti-communist legislation of the fifties. COINTELPRO-SWP was one of many subsequent programs; the others attacked Puerto Rican Independence groups, the KKK, Black militants, and the "New Left" (anti-war and student groups. In COINTELPRO-SWP, the FBI was particularly concerned with interfering in the party's electoral campaigns. The bureau pursued this goal through writing slanderous letters and publicizing dubious aspects of SWP candidates' backgrounds. The FBI also persuaded the established parties to challenge SWP's right to be on the ballot, as in the 1969 New York mayoral election.

The FBI tried to drive wedges within the SWP by similar means over doctrinal, racial and sexual issues. They attempted to pit the party and its allies in the civil rights and anti-war movements against one and another. And, as in Bohmer's case, the FBI often stooped to intimidation. By pressuring employers to remove leftists from their staffs, the FBI was able to "separate from their employment" a good number of SWPers, particularly in educational institutions in the South and Southwest.

Though the tactics for COINTELPRO-SWP were tailored to the SWP's specific situation as a party that competes in elections, the FBI's methods were essentially similar to those used in other such programs. The FBI took a harsher line on black groups, particularly the Black Panthers. An important new discovery is that the FBI through an informer supplied the Chicago police with a floor plan of Panther leader Fred Hampton's apartment before the apartment was raided and Hampton killed. This development lends support to the contention that Hampton, who was killed in bed, neither shot back nor fell victim to an accident, but rather was murdered by police acting on the encouragement of the FBI.

THE OVERALL PICTURE of FBI activities that emerges from these documents is one of flagrant disregard for legality and constitutional guarantees in its quest to suppress what Hoover considered dangerous subversion. None of the groups against which COINTELPRO was directed has engaged in illegal activities. In fact, it was precisely the legal activities of the SWP which drove the FBI to attack them; Hoover ordered a disruption campaign against the SWP because,

It has, over the past several years, been openly espousing its line on a local and national basis through running candidates for public office and strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as Castro's Cuba and integration in the South.

Although Hoover dismantled COINTELPRO after its cover blew in 1971, its activities continued informally for several years afterward. Only the decline of the New Left and the general furor over governmental abuses of power as a result of Watergate have brought about a major decrease in the level of its illegal activities to suppress dissent. In this context, it is worth recalling, as Noam Chomsky points out in his introduction to COINTELPRO, that such programs have been carried out under administration of both political parties. They belong to a powerful tradition of restricting the political liberties of leftists which developed after World War II, and are not likely to vanish with the more transitory crimes of the Nixon regime.

HOW IMPORTANT AND EFFECTIVE was COINTELPRO in sabotaging efforts to build a strong leftist political movement during the sixties? Obviously, many of the FBI's maneuvers were crazy and ineffectual, such as the investigation of a teen-age girl who wrote to the SWP for a school project or the bureau's ludicrous attempts to write divisive letters in the "hip" lingo of the Movement. Many liberals would go further and argue that the whole enterprise was basically a simple product of Hoover's obsessions, because none of the groups targeted represented a plausible threat to national security. But if one believes, as I do, that the anti-war movement played a decisive role in forcing the end of the Vietnam war by limiting American military and political options, and that the New Left potentially represented a serious movement for social change, then the basic anxieties of the FBI seem more rational.

Reading COINTELPRO, it is difficult to gauge the FBI's effectiveness in disrupting its targets. These documents show that the bureau failed to foment splits between groups like the SWP and the Student Mobilization Committee. But it undoubtedly created a prevalent atmosphere of distrust on the left (dismissed by many at the time as paranoia). The program was also enormously successful in damaging the lives and careers of individual activists, perhaps the most immediately tragic aspect of the affair. Because these documents deal primarily with COINTELPRO-SWP, they do not shed any light on the organizations which did split, with unfortunate results. It's well worth speculating what role FBI agents played in the 1969 SDS split and in the numerous splits in the Panthers.

To grasp the full impact of state repression on the New Left, it is necessary to place covert actions in the context of overt governmental actions of equally dubious legality, specifically the wave of prosecutions that the Nixon-Mitchell Justice Department trumped up, almost none of which has stood up in court. These trials--The Chicago 8, the Panther 21, the Harrisburg 7, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton--not only deprived the left of its most capable leaders for crucial periods of time, but forced it to concentrate its energies and funds to obtain their releases. I do not want to argue that the New Left would have been dramatically more successful in terms of its long-range goals had the repression been less severe. Political movements which are well organized or possess a solid social base can survive even the most severe repression--The Portuguese Communist Party, for example, survived 60 years underground. Nevertheless, the extent of overt and covert repression had a good deal to do with the precipitate collapse of the Movement; precisely how much remains to be prised out of the FBI's vaults.