COINTELPRO in the 70s
excerpted from the book
WAR AT HOME
by Brian Glick
Government harassment of U.S. political activists clearly
exists today, violating our fundamental democratic rights and
creating a climate of fear and distrust which undermines our efforts
to challenge official policy. Similar attacks on social justice
movements came to light during the 1960s. Only years later did
we learn that these had been merely the visible tip of an iceberg.
Largely hidden at the time was a vast government program to neutralize
domestic political opposition through "covert action"
(political repression carried out secretly or under the guise
of legitimate law enforcement).
The 1960s program, coordinated by the FBI under the code name
"COINTELPRO," was exposed in the 1970s and supposedly
stopped. But covert operations against domestic dissidents did
not end. They have persisted and become an integral part of government
activity. ...
Domestic Covert Action Did Not End in the 1970s
... While domestic covert operations were scaled down once
the 1960s upsurge had subsided (thanks in part to the success
of COINTELPRO), they did not stop. In its April 27, 1971 directives
disbanding COINTELPRO, the FBI provided for future covert action
to continue "with tight procedures to ensure absolute security."
The results are apparent in the record of 1970s covert operations
which have so far come to light:
The Native American Movement:
1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native American resistance
have been well documented by Ward Churchill and others. In 1973,
the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota as American Indian Movement (AIM) activists gathered
there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee, the site of an earlier
U.S. massacre of Native Americans. The FBI directed the entire
71-day siege, deploying federal marshals, U.S. Army personnel,
Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local GOONs (Guardians of the
Oglala Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force), and a vast array
of heavy weaponry.
In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out
war on AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69
residents of the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political
murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in
Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest
against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological
warfare.
Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign
to reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian
savage." In one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that
AIM "Dog Soldiers" planned widespread "sniping
at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in South
Dakota. The son of liberal U.S. Senator (and Arab-American activist)
James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the
Bureau issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the
country.
To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members
Paul "Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk"
Billings for the brutal murder of a Los Angeles taxi driver. A
bogus AIM note taking credit for the killing was found pinned
to a signpost near the murder site, along with a bundle of hair
said to be the victim's "scalp. " Newspaper headlines
screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical Indians."
By the time the defendants were finally cleared of the spurious
charges, many of AIM's main financial backers had been scared
away and its work among a major urban concentration of Native
people was in ruin.
In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national
security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative
for the FBI. As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense
Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other Native American
leaders, Durham had routinely participated in confidential strategy
sessions. He confessed to stealing organizational funds during
his two years with AIM, and to setting up the arrest of AIM militants
for actions he had organized. It was Durham who authored the AIM
documents that the FBI consistently cited to demonstrate the group's
supposed violent tendencies.
Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence
Committee announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public
hearings on FBI operations against AIM. Three days later, armed
FBI agents assaulted an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation.
When the smoke cleared, AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and
two FBI agents lay dead. The media, barred from the scene "to
preserve the evidence," broadcast the Bureau's false accounts
of a bloody "Indian ambush," and the congressional hearings
were quietly canceled.
The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last
pockets of resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman
of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale
military-type invasion of the reservation" complete with
M-16s, Huey helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel
carriers. Eventually AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for
the agents' deaths before a right-wing judge who met secretly
with the FBI. AIM member Anna Mae Aquash was found murdered after
FBI agents threatened to kill her unless she helped them to frame
Peltier. Peltier's conviction, based on perjured testimony and
falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was upheld on appeal. (The
panel of federal judges included William Webster until the very
day of his official appointment as Director of the FBI.) Despite
mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial, and Amnesty
International's call for a review of his case, the Native American
leader remains in maximum security prison.
The Black Movement:
Government covert action against Black activists also continued
in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community based groups to the
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the surviving
remnants of the Black Panther Party.
In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit
and disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based
grassroots civil rights group struggling to stop Klan violence.
In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard
Perry, code-named "Othello," infiltrated and disrupted
local Black groups and took personal credit for the fire that
razed the Watts Writers Workshop's multi-million dollar cultural
center in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los Angeles Police Department
later admitted infiltrating at least seven 1970s community groups,
including the Black-led Coalition Against Police Abuse.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police
to frame nine local civil rights workers and the Rev. Ben Chavis,
field organizer for the Commission for Racial Justice of the United
Church of Christ. Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help
Black communities respond to escalating racist violence against
school desegregation. Instead of arresting Klansmen, the ATF and
police coerced three young Black prisoners into falsely accusing
Chavis and the others of burning white-owned property. Although
all three prisoners later admitted they had lied in response to
official threats and bribes, the FBI found no impropriety. The
courts repeatedly refused to reopen the case and the Wilmington
Ten served many years in prison before pressure from international
religious and human rights groups won their release.
As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous
Black economic and political institutions in the deep South, the
Bureau repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts
to buy land. On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed
end of COINTELPRO, the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn
assault on national RNA offices in Jackson, Mississippi. Carrying
a warrant for a fugitive who had been brought to RNA Headquarters
by FBI informer Thomas Spells, the attackers concentrated their
fire where the informer's floor plan indicated that RNA President
Imari Obadele slept. Though Obadele was away at the time of the
raid, the Bureau had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of
conspiracy to assault a government agent.
The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panthers' organization
and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenseless as the
government moved to prevent them from regrouping. On August 21,
1971, national Party officer George Jackson, world-renowned author
of the political autobiography Soledad Brother, was murdered by
San Quentin prison authorities on the pretext of an attempted
jailbreak. In July 1972, Southern California Panther leader Elmer
"Geronimo" Pratt was successfully framed for a senseless
$70 robbery-murder committed while he was hundreds of miles away
in Oakland, California, attending Black Panther meetings for which
the FBI managed to "lose" all of its surveillance records.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act later
revealed that at least two FBI agents had infiltrated Pratt's
defense committee. They also indicated that the state's main witness,
Julio Butler, was a paid informer who had worked in the Party
under the direction of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department.
For many years, FBI Director Webster publicly denied that Pratt
had ever been a COINTELPRO target, despite the documentary proof
in his own agency's records.
Also targeted well into the 1970s were former Panthers assigned
to form an underground to defend against armed government attack
on the Party. It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation
Army (BLA) when the Party was destroyed. FBI files show that,
within a month of the close of COINTELPRO, further Bureau operations
against the BLA were mapped out in secret meetings convened by
presidential aide John Ehrlichman and attended by President Nixon
and Attorney General Mitchell. In the following years, many former
Panther leaders were murdered by the police in supposed "shoot-outs"
with the BLA. Others, such as Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba
Al-Mujahid Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore), and the New York
3 (Herman Bell, Anthony "Jalil" Bottom, and Albert "Nuh"
Washington) were sentenced to long prison terms after rigged trials.
In the case of the New York 3, FBI ballistics reports withheld
during their mid-1970s trials show that bullets from an alleged
murder weapon did not match those found at the site of the killings
for which they are still serving life terms. The star witness
against them has publicly recanted his testimony, swearing that
he lied after being tortured by police (who repeatedly jammed
an electric cattle prod into his testicles) and secretly threatened
by the prosecutor and judge. The same judge later dismissed petitions
to reopen the case, refusing to hold any hearing or to disqualify
himself, even though his misconduct is a major issue. As the NY3
continued to press for a new trial, their evidence was ignored
by the news media while their former prosecutor's one-sided, racist
"docudrama" on the case, Badge of the Assassin, aired
on national television.
The Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements:
From 1972-1974, La Raza Unida Party of Texas was plagued with
repeated, unsolved COINTELPRO-style political break-ins. Former
government operative Eustacio "Frank" Martinez has admitted
that after the close of COINTELPRO, the U. S . Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) paid him to help destroy La Casa de
Carnalisimo, a Chicano community anti-drug program in Los Angeles.
Martinez, who had previously infiltrated the Brown Berets and
the Chicano Moratorium, stated that the ATF directed him to provoke
bombings and plant a drug pusher in La Casa.
In 1973, Chicano activist and lawyer Francisco "Kiko"
Martinez was indicted in Colorado on trumped-up bombing charges
and suspended from the bar. He was forced to leave the United
States for fear of assassination by police directed to shoot him
"on sight." When Martinez was eventually brought to
trial in the 1980s, many of the charges against him were dropped
for insufficient evidence and local juries acquitted him of others.
One case ended in a mistrial when it was found that the judge
had met secretly with prosecutors, police, and government witnesses
to plan perjured testimony, and had conspired with the FBI to
conceal video cameras in the courtroom.
Starting in 1976, the FBI manipulated the grand jury process
to assault both the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements. Under
the guise of investigating Las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion National
Puertorriqueno (FALN) and other Puerto Rican urban guerrillas,
the Bureau harassed and disrupted a cultural center, an alternative
high school, and other promising community organizing efforts
in Chicago's Puerto Rican barrio and in the Chicano communities
of Denver and northern New Mexico. It subpoenaed radical Puerto
Rican trade union leader Federico Cintron Fiallo and key staff
of the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs of the U.S. Episcopal
Church to appear before federal grand juries and jailed them for
refusing to cooperate. The independent labor movement in Puerto
Rico and the Commission's important work in support of Puerto
Rican and Chicano organizing were effectively discredited.
On July 25, 1978, an undercover agent lured two young Puerto
Rican independence activists, Carlos Soto Arrivi and Arnaldo Dario
Rosado, to their deaths in a police ambush at Cerro Maravilla,
Puerto Rico. The agent, Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, worked under
the direct supervision of the FBI-trained intelligence chief of
the island's police force. The FBI refused to investigate when
the police claimed they were merely returning gunfire initiated
by the activists. Later it was proved that Soto and Dario had
surrendered and were then beaten and shot dead while on their
knees. Though a number of officers were found guilty of perjury
in the cover-up and one was sentenced for the murder, the officials
who set up the operation remain free. Gonzalez has been promoted.
On November 11, 1979, Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, popular socialist
leader of the movement to stop U.S. Navy bombing practice on the
inhabited Puerto Rican island of Vieques, was murdered in the
U.S. penitentiary in Tallahassee, Florida. Though U.S. authorities
claimed 'suicide," Rodriguez Cristobal, in the second month
of a six-month term for civil disobedience, had been in good spirits
when seen by his lawyer hours before his death. He had been subjected
to continuous threats and harassment, including forced drugging
and isolation, during his confinement. Though he was said to have
been found hanging by a bed sheet, there was a large gash on his
forehead and blood on the floor of his cell.
The Women's, Gay, and Lesbian Movements:
FBI documents show that the women's liberation movement remained
a major target of covert operations throughout the 1970s. Long
after the official end of COINTELPRO, the Bureau continued to
infiltrate and disrupt feminist organizations, publications, and
projects. Its view of the women's movement is revealed by a 1973
report listing the national women's newspaper 'Off Our Backs'
as "armed and dangerous -- extremist".
Covert operations also continued against lesbian and gay organizing.
One former FBI informer, Earl Robert "Butch" Merritt,
revealed that from October 1971 through June 1972 he received
a weekly stipend to infiltrate gay publications and organizations
in the District of Columbia. He was ordered to conduct break-ins,
spread false rumors that certain gay activists were actually police
or FBI informants, and create racial dissension between and within
groups . One assignment involved calling Black groups to tell
them they would not be welcome at Gay Activists Alliance and Gay
Liberation Front meetings.
As in the case of the Puerto Rican and Chicano movements,
criminal investigations provided a convenient pretext for escalated
FBI attacks on lesbian and feminist activists in the mid-1970s.
In purported pursuit of anti-war fugitives Susan Saxe and Kathy
Powers, FBI agents flooded the women's communities of Boston,
Philadelphia, Lexington (Kentucky), Hartford and New Haven. Their
conspicuous interrogation of hundreds of politically active women,
followed by highly publicized grand jury subpoenas and jailings,
wreaked havoc in health collectives and other vital projects.
Activists and potential supporters were scared off, and fear spread
across the country, hampering women's and lesbian organizing nationally.
The Anti-war and New Left Movements:
Government covert action against the New Left and anti-war
movements also persisted, especially as activists mobilized to
protest the 1972 Republican and Democratic Party conventions.
In San Diego, where the Republicans initially planned to convene,
this campaign culminated in the January 6, 1972 attempt on the
life of anti-convention organizer Peter Bohmer by a "Secret
Army Organization" of ex-Minutemen formed, subsidized, armed,
and protected by the FBI.
Movement organizing and government sabotage continued when
the Republican convention was moved to Miami Beach, Florida. In
May 1972, Bill Lemmer, Southern Regional Coordinator of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (WAW), a key group in the convention
protest coalition, surfaced as an undercover FBI operative. Lemmer's
false testimony enabled the Bureau to haul the WAW's national
leadership before a grand jury hundreds of miles away during the
week of the convention.
FBI efforts to put the WAW "out of business" were
later confirmed by another ex-operative, Joe Burton of Tampa,
Florida, told the New York Times "that between 1972 and 1974
he worked as a paid FBI operative assigned to infiltrate and disrupt
various radical groups in this country and Canada." Burton
described how specialists were flown in from FBI Headquarters
to help him forge bogus documents and "establish a 'sham'
political group, 'the Red Star Cadre,' for disruptive purposes."
The same article reported that "two other former FBI
operatives, Harry E. Schafer, 3d, and his wife, Jill, told of
similar disruptive activity they undertook at the bureau's direction
during the same period." Working out of "a similar bogus
New Orleans front group, termed the 'Red Collective,"' the
Schafers boasted of diverting substantial funds which had been
raised to support the American Indian Movement.
The Labor Movement:
One of agent-provocateur Joe Burton's main targets was the
United Electrical Workers Union (UE). The FBI falsified records
to get Burton into UE Tampa Local 1201 soon after its successful
1973 organizing drive upset the Westinghouse Corporation's plan
to develop a chain of non-union plants in the South. Burton's
attacks on genuine activists repeatedly disrupted UE meetings.
His ultra-left proclamations in the union's name antagonized newly
organized workers and gave credibility to the company's red-baiting.
Burton also helped the FBI move against the United Farm Workers
and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME).
In the mid-1970s, the FBI was instrumental in covering up
the murder of labor activist Karen Silkwood and the theft of her
files documenting the radioactive contamination of workers at
the Kerr McGee nuclear fuel plant near Oklahoma City. Silkwood,
elected to the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers local bargaining
committee, had amassed proof that the company was falsifying safety
reports to hide widespread exposure to dangerous levels of highly
carcinogenic plutonium. She was killed when her car crashed into
a concrete embankment enroute to a November 13, 1974 meeting with
New York Times reporter David Burnham. Her files were never recovered
from the wreck. While prominent independent experts concluded
that Silkwood's car was bumped from behind and forced off the
road, the FBI found that she fell asleep at the wheel after overdosing
on Quaaludes and that she never had any files. It quickly closed
the case, and helped Kerr-McGee sabotage congressional investigations
and posthumously slander Silkwood as a mentally unstable drug
addict. Key to the smear campaign were articles and testimony
by Jacque Srouji, a Tennessee journalist secretly in the employ
of the FBI, who later confessed to having served in a long string
of 1960s COINTELPRO operations.
In 1979, government operatives played key roles in the massacre
of communist labor organizers during a multi-racial anti-Klan
march in Greensboro, North Carolina. Heading the KKK/Nazi death
squad was Ed Dawson, a long-time paid FBI/police informer in the
Klan. Leading the local American Nazi Party branch into Dawson's
"United Racist Front" was U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms undercover agent Bemard Butkovich. Though their controlling
agencies were fully warned of the Front's murderous plans, they
did nothing to protect the demonstrators. Instead, the police
gave Dawson a copy of the march route and withdrew as his caravan
moved in for the kill. Dawson's sharpshooters carefully picked
off key cadre of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), including
the president and president-elect of two Amalgamated Clothing
and Textile Workers Union locals, an organizer at a third local
mill, and a leader of AFSCME's organizing drive at a nearby medical
center. In the aftermath, the FBI attempted to cover up the government's
role and to put the blame on the CWP.
At the turn of the decade, the Bureau joined with Naval Intelligence
and the San Diego Police to neutralize a militant multi-racial
union at the shipyards of the National Steel and Shipbuilding
Company, a major U.S. naval contractor. The Bureau paid Ramon
Barton to infiltrate Iron workers Local 627 when it elected leftist
officers and began to publicly protest dangerous working conditions.
After an explosion from a gas leak killed two workers, Barton
lured three others into helping him build a bomb and transport
it in his van, where they were arrested. Though the workers entrapped
by Barton were not union officials and were acquitted of most
charges by a San Diego jury, the Ironworkers International used
their trial as a pretext for placing the local in trusteeship
and expelling its elected officers.
excerpted from the book
War at Home
by Brian Glick
published by
South End Press
116 Saint Botolph Street, Boston, MA 02115
War
At Home
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