Political Repression in the United States

Historical Overview

From the founding of the country to the mid-1950s:

Covert police methods have been used against progressive social movements since the founding of the country. Undercover operatives disrupted the historic efforts of rebellious slaves and Native American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican resistance. Dissident journalists, insurgent workers and farmers were arrested on false charges and jailed or hung after rigged trials. Progressive activists faced the blatant brutality of hired thugs and right-wing vigilantes backed by government troops. As the country grew more urban and industrial, newly formed municipal police forces came to play a greater role in suppressing dissent. By the turn of this century, local police departments were running massive anti-union operations in collaboration with the Pinkertons and other private detective agencies.

During World War I, the federal government began to take more responsibility for control of domestic dissent. From 1917 on, the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, coordinated its work closely with a 250,000 member right-wing vigilante group, the American Protective League. Together they mounted nationwide raids, arrests, and prosecutions which jailed thousands of draft resisters and labor activists and destroyed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies").

Following the Russian Revolution, the Bureau helped foment the "Red Scare" of 1919-20. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover took personal responsibility for deporting "Red Emma" Goldman and directing the Palmer Raids in which thousands of progressive immigrants were rounded up, jailed, and brutalized, and hundreds were deported.

Stung by public criticism of these raids, Hoover switched to more covert methods in the early 1920s. His men infiltrated the ranks of striking railway workers and penetrated the Saco-Vanzetti Defense Committee to steal funds raised to support the indicted anarchists. The FBI also masterminded the destruction of the main Black movement of the post-World War I period, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). FBI agents penetrated the multi-million member UNIA and set up the federal mail fraud conviction that discredited its charismatic leader, leading to Garvey's deportation and the group's collapse.

Through the rest of the 1920s, the Bureau kept a low profile as domestic insurgency subsided. In the early years of the Depression, primary responsibility for policing dissent remained in the hands of local law enforcement agencies, private detectives, and right-wing groups such as the American Legion. But during World War II, the FBI vastly expanded its operations and acquired new covert technology, including the capacity for expert forgery. In the aftermath of the war, as the United States began to exercise hegemonic world power and to identify the Soviet Union as its main enemy, the Bureau firmly established its political role as an accepted institu-tional reality. It was in this period that the domestic intelligence programs of the FBI became permanent features of the government.

The FBI's ability to consolidate political police powers can be attributed to the "Cold War" fears which swept the country during the late 1940s and the 1950s. The Bureau also played a central role in fomenting those fears. In this atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, as in the preceding years of war time fear of espionage, the FBI was free to move against a broad range of domestic political movements. The brunt of its attack was directed against those who sought progressive social change.

They were behind the postwar witch hunts mounted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Joseph McCarthy's Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee. Directed by law to investigate the loyalty of federal employees, the FBI secretly passed confidential raw files to its congressional allies.

FBI agents set up and orchestrated the pivotal spy trials that made the witch hunts credible. In each case, the star witness was an FBI informer whose initial contradictory accounts were meshed into semi-coherent testimony only after months of careful FBI coaching. The supposedly incorruptible FBI vouched for the authenticity of key documentary evidence which activists later learned could easily have been forged, and subsequent investigation suggests that cases may well have been fabricated. At the time, however, their impact was devastating. By appearing to validate the witch hunts, they paved the way for the purge of an entire generation of radicals from U.S. political and cultural life.

From 1936-56, ex-FBI agents' report that activists' homes and offices were routinely burglarized. As early as 1939, the Bureau began to compile a secret "Security Index" listing subversives to be detained in the event of a "national emergency. William Sullivan, former head of the FBI intelligence Division testified that, "We were engaged in tactics, to divide, confuse, weaken, in diverse ways, an organization. We were engaged in that when I entered the Bureau in 1941." The Senate Intelligence Committee found that by 1946, the Bureau had a "policy" of preparing and disseminating "propaganda to "discredit" its targets.

When congressional investigations, political trials, and other traditional legal modes of repression failed to counter the growing movements, and even helped to fuel them, the FBI and police moved outside the law. They resorted to the secret and systematic use of fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity. Their methods ranged far beyond surveillance, amounting to a home front version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.

Mid-1950s consolidation and expansion of counter-intelligence programs: In 1956, the president of the U.S. ordered the creation of a new FBI Counterintelligence Program (COIN-TELPRO). It consolidated and expanded the FBI's historic mission "to foster factionalism, bring the Communist Party and its leaders into disrepute before the American public and cause confusion and dissatisfaction among rank-and-file members." It called for a better coordinated, more focused, "all-out disruptive attack" to counteract the new judicial restrictions on political prosecutions and to eliminate once and for all a U.S. left already in disarray. The FBI used COINTELPRO to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or neutralize" specific individuals and groups. Agents worked in close coordination with local police and prosecutors. Other collaborators included friendly news media; business and foundation executives; university, church and trade union officials; and such "patriotic" organizations as the American Legion.

COINTELPRO became the cutting edge of the Bureau's attack on the rising struggles of the 1960s. It provided the frame-work for more intensive operations against the resurgent Black movement and attempts to do away with what remained of an organized radical presence in the United States. It also formed the FBI's primary response to the student and anti-war protests which swept the country during the 1960s.

The FBI distorted the public image of Blacks and New Leftists to legitimize their arrest and imprisonment and scapegoat them as the cause of working people's problems. Television, popular magazines, and daily papers stereotyped Blacks as hardened criminals and welfare chiselers or as the supposedly affluent beneficiaries of "reverse discrimination." White youth were portrayed first as hedonistic hippies and mindless terrorists, later as an apolitical self-indulgent "me generation." Both were scape-goated as threats to "decent, hard-working Middle America." The mass media, owned by big business and cowed by government and right-wing attack, also helped to bury radical activism by simply ceasing to cover it.

The FBI and police also instigated violence and fabricated movement horrors. Dissidents were deliberately "criminalized" through false charges, frame-ups, and offensive, bogus leaflets and other materials published in their name. They eliminated the leaders of mass movements. Prominent radicals were attacked when they began to develop broad follo-wings and express anti-capitalist ideas. Charismatic orators and dynamic organizers were "neutralized" before their skills could be transferred to others and stable structures established to carry on their work. Some were portrayed as crooks, thugs, philanderers, or government agents, while others were physically threatened or assaulted until they abandoned their work. Still others were murdered under phony pretexts, such as "shoot-outs" in which the only shots fired came from the police. Many have come to view Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and that of Malcolm X as a domestic covert operation.

Government documents implicate the FBI and police in the bitter break-up of such pivotal groups as the Black Panther Party, SDS, and the Liberation News Service, and in the collapse of repeated efforts to form long-term coalitions across racial, class, and regional lines. They exacerbated the internal stresses of target groups until beleaguered activists turned on one another. Otherwise manageable disagreements within groups were inflamed until they erupted into hostile splits that shattered alliances, tore groups apart, and drove dedicated activists out of the movement. Whites were pitted against Blacks, Blacks against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, students against workers, workers against people on welfare, men against women, religious activists against atheists, Christians against Jews, and Jews against Muslims. "Anonymous" accusations of infidelity ripped couples apart. Backers of women's and gay liberation were attacked as "dykes" or "faggots." Money was repeatedly stolen and precious equipment sabotaged to intensify pressure and sow suspicion and mistrust.

The use of such COINTELPRO counter-subversive tactics has been documented in each of the last nine administrations, Democratic as well as Republican. While initiated under Eisenhower, it grew from one program to six under the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson. It flourished when an outspoken liberal, Ramsey Clark, was Attorney General (1966-1968). Similar programs continued under other names during the Carter years as well as under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. They have outlived J. Edgar Hoover and remained in place under all of his successors.

The "President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice":

In response to urban ghetto disturbances of 1965-1966, the newly created President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice urged local police to establish procedures for the acquisition and channeling of intelligence to higher government echelons, to facilitate a coordinated response to a "true riot situation" in the future. This recommendation cemented the Bureau's liaison with urban police units for the exchange of information, serving to bolster the existing counter-subversive, agitator-oriented intelligence system.

The Intelligence Evaluative Committee (IEC):

The IEC was created in May 1969 to evaluate and assess threats of civil disturbances. In December 1970, the program was enlarged to incorporate operational procedures with the already existing function of evaluation. The IEC was organized after consultation with the director of the CIA and functioned in secret, headed by the Assistant Director of the FBI and included representatives of five other Justice Department units, the CIA, the Department of Defense (military intelligence), the National Security Agency, and the Secret Service. Assistant Attorney General Robert C. Mardian served as chairman and John Dean as White House representative. Exposure of covert operations in the 1970s and attempts at reform:

By the end of the 1960s, the government's obsession with subversion had homogenized virtually all intelligence unit operations, whatever their formally stated purposes, from the collection of taxes by the IRS to the protection of the safety of public officials by the Secret Service, and the massive domestic military intelligence programs directed against civilian dissent.

Exposure of covert operations in the 1970s and attempts at reform: In March 1971, a "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI removed secret files on the COINTELPRO program from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and released them to the press. That same year, agents began to resign from the Bureau and to blow the whistle on its covert operations. Law-suits under the Freedom Of Information Act forced the FBI to release more COINTELPRO files to major news media. By 1975, both houses of Congress had launched formal inquiries into government "intelligence activities." They traced the chain of command for COINTELPRO operations to Attorney General Mitchell and the White House, with the FBI implicated in a massive cover-up involving the President and his top staff. By 1971, congressional hearings had already disclosed U.S. Army infiltration of domestic political movements. Similar CIA and local police activity soon came to light, along with ghastly accounts of CIA operations abroad to destabilize democratically elected governments and assassinate heads of state.

The public exposure of COINTELPRO and other government abuses elicited a flurry of apparent reform. The CIA's director and counter-intelligence chief were ousted, and the CIA and the Army were again directed to cease covert operations against domestic targets. The U.S. Freedom of Information Act was amended (over the President's veto) to provide some degree of genuine public access to FBI documents.

As part of the general face-lift, the FBI publicly apologized for COINTELPRO, and municipal governments began to disband the local police "red squads" that had served as the FBI's main accomplices. A new Attorney General notified several hundred activists that they had been victims of COINTELPRO and issued guidelines limiting future operations. Top FBI officials were indicted for ordering the burglary of activists' offices and homes; two were convicted, and several others retired or resigned. A prestigious federal judge, William Webster, was appointed by President Carter to clean house and build a "new FBI."

Pressure to promote the appearance of genuine reform was so great that the FBI had to divulge an unprecedented, detailed account of many of its domestic covert operations, but the attacks on social-justice movements that came to light were only the tip of an iceberg. Many important files continue to be withheld, and others have been destroyed.

All agencies under congressional investigation were allowed to withhold most of their files and to edit the Senate Committee's reports before publication. The House Committee's report, including an account of FBI and CIA obstruction of its inquiry, was suppressed altogether after part was leaked to the press. Former operatives report that the most heinous and embarrassing actions were never committed to writing.

Behind the public hoopla of congressional investigation, the FBI's war at home continued unabated. Domestic covert action did not end with the exposure of COINTELPRO. Officials with broad personal knowledge of COINTELPRO were silenced, most notably William C. Sullivan, who created the program and ran it throughout the 1960s. Sullivan was killed in an uninvestigated 1977 "hunting accident" shortly after giving extensive information to a grand jury investigating the FBI, but before he could testify publicly.

Director Webster's highly touted reforms did not create a "new FBI." They served mainly to modernize the existing Bureau and to make it even more dangerous. He promoted inter-agency cooperation, and hired women and people of color to more effectively penetrate a broader range of political targets.

State and local police similarly up-graded their repressive capabilities in the 1970s while learning to present a more friendly public face. The "red squads" that had harassed 1960s activists were quietly resurrected under other names. Paramilitary SWAT teams and tactical squads were formed, along with highly politicized "community relations" and "beat rep" programs featuring conspicuous Black, Latin and female officers. Generous federal funding and sophisticated technology became available through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, while FBI-led "joint anti-terrorist task forces" introduced a new level of inter-agency coordination.

Meanwhile, the CIA continued to use university professors, journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations, and philanthropic fronts to mold U.S. public opinion. Even as attempts at reform were taking place, planning for a more formal information-gathering project began in the fall of 1976, in a direct response to ghetto disturbances in Newark, Detroit and other cities. After unsuccessful Justice Department efforts to use the FBI as a ghetto-monitoring instrument, the White house turned the job over to the Army. Army intelligence field personnel were integrated into the civilian intelligence community, where they exchanged information and met together on a regular basis. These meetings could include members of the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation, local police and sometimes university security officers. There were frequent joint patrols and even joint under-cover operations.

At the same time, Army, Special Forces and other elite military units began to train local police for counter-insurgency and to intensify their own preparations, following the guidelines of the secret Pentagon contingency plans, "Garden Plot" and "Cable Splicer." These plans are based on texts and manuals on "Low Intensity Conflict" techniques developed by the United States and its European allies while maintaining control of their colonies and neo-colonies in countries such as Algeria, the Congo, India, Northern Ireland, Chile and Vietnam.

The leading treatise, Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping, by Frank Kitson (British commander in Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland) restates the basic precepts of COINTELPRO and pound home the necessity for continuous covert operations, insisting that infiltration and "psychological operations" be mounted against dissident groups in "normal times," before any mass movement can develop.

War at home intensifies in the 1980s:

The 1980s have been marked both by the rise of right-wing political power and new forms of popular opposition to reactionary government policy. Under these conditions, the danger of domestic covert action is greater than ever. One indication of the severity of the current threat is the level of recent political repression. Evidence of current infiltration and clandestine disruption is surfacing at an alarming rate. Taken together, these developments leave us only one safe assumption: full-scale covert operations are already underway to neutralize today's opposition movements before they can reach the massive level of the 1960s.

COINTELPRO-type covert activities have not only persisted throughout the '80s, but have been legalized and endorsed at the highest levels of government. Counter-subversive intelligence operations are now more inter-departmentally integrated and massive in scale. FBI and police intelligence units have been fully rehabilitated, and official secrecy has been restored. The CIA and military have also assumed expanded home-front roles.

In the 1980s the Freedom of Infor-mation Act, as a source of major disclosures about COINTELPRO-type activities, was drastically narrowed through administrative and judicial reinterpretation as well as legislative amendment. Thousands of government files were shielded from public scrutiny under presidential directives that vastly expanded the range of information classified "top-secret." Government employees now face censorship even after they retire, and new laws make it a federal crime to disclose "any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent."

Within months of taking office, Reagan pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, the only FBI officials convicted of COINTELPRO crimes. His congressional allies publicly honored these criminals and praised their work. The President continually revived the tired old "Red Scare," adding a new "terrorist" bogeyman, while Attorney-General Meese campaigned to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights and limit judicial review of the constitutionality of government action.

Much of what was done outside the law under COINTELPRO has since been legalized by Executive Order No. 12333 (Decem-ber 4, 1981) and the Attorney General's new "Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations" (March 7, 1983). For the first time in U.S. history, government infiltration "for the purpose of influencing the activity of "domestic political organizations has received official sanction. This prerogative is now extended to the FBI and anyone acting on its behalf.

Executive Order No. 12333 also asserts the President's right to authorize CIA "special activities" (the official euphemism for covert operations) and has legally sanctioned such activities anywhere "in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad." It legalizes "counterintelligence activities...within the United States" on the part of the FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. "Specialized equip-ment, technical knowledge, or assistance of expert personnel may be provided by any of these agencies "to support local law enforcement." All are free to mount electronic and mail surveillance without a warrant, and the FBI may also conduct warrantless "unconsented physical searches" (break-ins) if the Attorney General finds probable cause to believe the action is "directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power." This signals open season on CISPES, sanctuary churches, anti-apartheid groups, and anyone else who maintains friendly relations with a country or movement opposed by the administration or who dares to organize protest against U.S. foreign policy.

Comprehensive preparations for the control of dissent were increased in the 1980s. Lt. Col. Oliver North (from the White House's National Security Council) working in conjunction with agents of the Federal Emergency Management Administration developed contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, establishing martial law, and holding political dissidents in concentration camps in the event of "national opposition against a U.S. military invasion abroad." The plans included intensified training of civilian police units by the military and coordination of all government intelligence units, establishing a network of communication and cooperation between the military, national guard, local and state police, FBI, CIA, and the Secret Services.

Procedures in Counter-Intelligence: Federal Bureau of Investigation Targets

The FBI is an independent organ of state administration operating to monitor, punish and frustrate extra-judicially the political activities of a country's nationals. It is the classic embodiment of a political police force with a counter-revolutionary mission typical of such units in non-democratic countries, a benchmark of a police state.

Targets:

The Bureau's primary intelligence targets are groups espousing various Marxist persuasions and their adherents. The selection of targets for surveillance reflects what may be called the politics of deferred reckoning. Domestic counter-subversive intelligence is, in theory, future oriented: "subversive" activities are, in the language of the Bureau, those "aimed at" the future overthrow, destruction, or undermining of the government, regardless of how legitimate these activities might currently be. Since 1936, the FBI has also targeted alleged "Communist front" groups: a broad range of non-Communist organizations allegedly "infiltrated" by one or more "communist agitator(s)." This argument justified a great expansion of surveillance activities. To this "subversive" classification of intelligence targets was added, in 1959, an "extremist" category. The staff and file-processing capability of the FBI's Inter-divisional Intelligence Unit was enlarged, and its resources also used to start an "extremist" file collection for the IRS. Its file holdings were disseminated to other intelligence units as well, including the CIA and a special Panther intelligence-oriented task force.

By April 1971, The Bureau had amassed over 14,000 separate entries, ultimately embracing such groups as the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, the Ku Klux Klan, and individuals from prominent public figures to lowly demonstrators. Return to top of page

Six major official COINTELPRO target categories:

Communist Party-USA: This was the first and largest program, used in the early and mid-1960s mainly against civil rights, civil liberties, and peace activists. Its targets included Martin Luther King, Jr., the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the NAACP, the National Lawyers Guild, the National Committee to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, Women's Strike for Peace, the American Friends Service Committee, and the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy.

Groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico (1960-'71):

This program targeted the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, La Alianza, and the Chicano Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.

Socialist Workers Party (1961-'69):

In addition to on-going attacks on the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, this program operated against whomever those groups supported or worked with, especially Malcom X and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

"Black Nationalist Hate Groups" (1967-'71):

Target groups included: Martin Luther King, Jr., the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam (Black Mus-lims), the National Welfare Rights Organization, the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of New Afrika, the Congress of African People, Black student unions, and many local Black churches and community organizations struggling for decent living conditions, justice, equality, and empowerment.

New Left (1968-'71): A program to destroy Students for a Democratic Society, the Peace and Freedom Party, the Institute for Policy Studies, and a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, student, GI, veteran, feminist, lesbian, gay, environmental, Marxist, and anarchist groups, as well as networks of food co-ops, health clinics, child care centers, schools, bookstores, newspapers, community centers, street theaters, rock groups, and communities that formed the infrastructure of the counter-culture.

"White Hate Groups" (1964-'71): This program functioned largely as a component of the FBI's operations against the progressive activists who were COINTELPRO's main targets. Under the cover of being even-handed and going after violent right-wing groups, the FBI actually gave covert aid to the Ku Klux Klan, Minutemen, Nazis, and other racist vigilantes. These groups received substantial funds, information, and protection (and suffered only token FBI harassment) so long as they directed their violence against COINTELPRO targets. They were not subjected to serious disruption unless they breached this tacit understanding and attacked established business and political leaders. While not officially listed as specific target categories, similar covert operations were also carried out against Native American, Asian-American, Arab-American, Iranian, and other activists.

Methodology Used in Surveillance/Covert Activities

Infiltration: The main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Infiltrators were agents (law enforcement officers disguised as activists) or informers (non-agents, often paid by the government) who worked in a movement or community under the direction of a law enforcement or intelligence agency. From 1940 until 1978, the FBI deployed some 37,000 informers (29,166 in security classifications and 7,893 the racial and extremist category). These are quite conservative totals. Excluded are informers with a "criminal informant" classification, and "administrative" category, those grouped with their targets under the listing "subversive activities, and others with a counterintelligence designation.

COINTELPRO documents and the confessions of former agents and informers indicate that while some 1960s infiltrators operated under "deep cover" discreetly spying for years without calling attention to themselves, others functioned as provocateurs. These operatives were directed to "seize every opportunity to carry out disruptive activity not only at meetings, conventions, etc., but also during social and other contacts. They spread rumors and made unfounded accusations to inflame disagreements among activists and provoke splits. They urged divisive proposals, sabotaged important activities, squandered scarce resources, stole funds, seduced leaders, exacerbated rivalries, provoked jealousy, and publicly embarrassed progressive groups. They repeatedly led zealous activists into unnecessary danger and set them up for prosecution, confident that the FBI would protect them from any adverse legal consequences.

While individual agents and informers advanced COINTELPRO objectives in various myriad ways, their very presence served a crucial strategic function: a concealed hostile presence to instill fear. It promoted a paranoia that undermined trust among activists and scared off potential supporters. This effect was enhanced by covertly spread rumors exaggerating the extent to which a particular movement or group was infiltrated.

The FBI often took advantage of this fear and distrust to have its infiltrators claim that a dedicated activist was a government agent. This maneuver, known as placing a "snitch jacket" or "bad jacket" on an activist, served to undermine the victim's effectiveness and to draw attention away from the actual agent. It generated confusion, fueled distrust and paranoia, diverted time and energy from a group's political work, turned co-workers against one another, and provoked expulsions and violence.

The FBI also used a support network of private groups for staging crowd scenes, demonstrations, and counter-demonstrations, and as a source of hostile claques to disrupt meetings through planted questions and provocation.

Psychological warfare from the outside:

While boring from within, the FBI and police also attacked dissident movements from the outside. They openly mounted propaganda campaigns through public addresses, news releases, books, pamphlets, magazine articles, radio, and television. Examples of past activities include: False media stories: The FBI routinely leaked false derogatory information to its collaborators in the news media. It created newspaper and magazine articles, and television "documentaries" which the media knowingly or unknowingly carried as their own. Copies were sent anonymously or under bogus letterheads to activists' financial backers, employers, business associates, families, neighbors, church officials, school administrators, landlords, and whomever else might cause them trouble.

Bogus leaflets, pamphlets and other publications:

The FBI routinely put out phony leaflets, posters pamphlets, newspapers, and other publications in the name of movement groups to discredit them and turn them against one another.

Anonymous letters and telephone calls:

The FBI sent anonymous letters and phone calls to activists to promote racial divisions and fears, accused activists of collaboration with authorities, corruption or sexual affairs with other activist's mates. These measures were intended to intimidate dissidents, disrupt coalitions, and provoke violence.

Pressure through employers, landlords, and others:

The FBI maneuvered to generate pressure on dissidents from their parents, children, spouses, landlords, employers, college administrators, church superiors, welfare agencies, credit bureaus, and the like. Anonymous letters and phone calls were often used to this end, bringing to bear the Bureau's immense power and authority. FBI intervention denied activists any number of foundation grants and public speaking engagements, cost activist's their jobs, deprived alternative newspapers of their printers, suppliers, and distributors and cost them crucial advertising revenues.

Tampering with mail and telephone service:

The FBI and CIA routinely used mail covers (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic surveillance in order to spy on 1960s movements. The CIA alone admitted to photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of first-class mail during the 1960s and to opening almost 215,000. Government agencies also tampered with mail, altering, delaying, or "disappearing" it. Dissidents' telephone communications often were similarly obstructed.

Disinformation to prevent or disrupt movement meetings and activities:

A common COINTELPRO tactic was to advertise a non-existent political event, or to misinform people of the time and place of an actual one.

Harassment through the legal system:

Conspicuous surveillance:

The FBI and police blatantly watched activists' homes, followed their cars, opened their mail, and attended their political events. The object was not to collect information (which was done surreptitiously), but to harass and intimidate.

"Investigative" interviews:

FBI agents often extracted damaging information from activists who did not know their legal right to refuse to speak or who thought they could outsmart the FBI. But the purpose of supposedly investigative interviews was actually far broader. They provided a powerful means of intimidation, scaring off potential activists and driving away those who had already become involved. Orchestrated campaigns of interviews were used to create a climate of fear among dissidents and their supporters. COINTELPRO directives advised widespread interviewing of activists and their friends, relatives, and associates to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles" and "get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

Grand juries:

Unlike an FBI request to talk, a grand jury subpoena carries legal penalties for non-cooperation. Those who refuse to testify can be jailed for contempt of court and may face criminal charges. It enables prosecutors to get around the Fifth Amendment right against compulsory self-incrimination. This process has been manipulated to turn the grand jury into a tool of political repression. Frustrated by the consistent refusal of trial juries to convict on charges of overtly political crimes, the FBI and the Justice Department convened over 100 grand juries in the late 1960s and subpoenaed more than 1,000 activists from the Black, Puerto Rican, student, women's, and anti-war movements. Many targets were so terrified that they dropped out of political activity. Others were jailed for contempt of court without any criminal charge or trial. This use of the contempt power is a scaled-down version of the political internment employed in South Africa and Northern Ireland.

Discriminatory enforcement of tax laws and other government regulations:

The FBI arranged for special, meticulous audits of tax returns filed by dissident activists and organizations. It worked with the Internal Revenue Service to deny or revoke the tax-exempt status of educational, charitable, and religious organizations that lawfully aided progressive causes.

The FBI and police similarly arranged for local authorities to selectively enforce building codes, health regulations, and zoning laws in order to fine or shut down alternative institutions such as child care centers, medical clinics, and GI coffee houses that movement groups ran near major U.S. military bases. They wreaked havoc with the licenses of progressive lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. When 1960s activists had to show identification (e.g. upon entering a courtroom to witness a political trial), they could expect to be jailed if they had left parking tickets or other minor fines unpaid.

False arrests:

COINTELPRO directives cite as exemplary the Philadelphia FBI’s 1967 success in having local militants "arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail" and "spent most of the summer in jail." FBI agents across the country were advised that since the "purpose...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." This technique was particularly effective in disrupting movement activities.

Political trials:

While many of the 1960s activists who were rounded up in this manner were quickly released, others faced full-blown prosecution. Among those tried for alleged crimes were advocates and organizers of draft resistance, pacifist, leaders of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention protests, and prominent Black activists. The trials achieved the effect that the FBI secretly intended: to "exhaust and demoralize" dissident movements, "even if actual prosecution is not successful as far as convictions are concerned." In most cases, the initial horrifying criminal charges received far more publicity than the eventual acquittals. The cost of lawyers, investigators, transcripts, depositions, expert witnesses, and other requisites of effective criminal defense proved staggering. Millions of dollars more had to be raised for bail bonds (a reported $4,890,580 by the Panthers alone during the period between May 1967 and December 1969). Those defendants who could not make bail, mainly Blacks and Latinos, were removed from their communities and jailed for months and even years. The main purpose of political trails was to slander progressive movements, drain their resources, and cause activists to "burn out" in defensive efforts that left little time or energy for organizing.

Wrongful imprisonment: Though most 1960s activists tried on political charges were eventually acquitted, many were convicted and imprisoned. Some were simply framed, such as Black anarchist Martin Sostre, sentenced to 30 to 41 years for allegedly selling narcotics from his radical bookstore in Buffalo, New York. Others, including Black Panther founder Huey Newton and Cleveland Black militant Ahmed Evans, were lured into armed self-defense for which they (but not their assailants) were convicted after rigged trials.

Still other 1960s activists were victims of the selective enforcement of laws routinely ignored throughout U.S. society. Lee Otis Johnson, a SNCC organizer in Texas, received a 30-year sentence for allegedly passing a single joint of marijuana to an undercover agent. John Sinclair, leader of Detroit's White Panther Party and editor of several alternative newspapers, was sentenced to ten years in a maximum security prison for possessing two joints.

Years later, the trials of imprisoned COINTELPRO targets were reviewed by the world human rights organization Amnesty International. Amnesty found official abuse to be so pervasive and egregious in these cases as to cast serious doubt on all the resulting convictions. It called for an official commission of inquiry into the effect of domestic intelligence activities on criminal trials in the USA.

Manipulation of probation and parole:

Particularly vulnerable were 1960s activists with pre-movement criminal records. Outspoken revolutionary prisoners such as George Jackson were repeatedly turned down by parole boards that had long since released inmates with comparable records. Eldrige Cleaver, national Panther official and 1968 U.S. presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, had his parole revoked because of criminal charges stemming from an April 1968 incident in which a group of Panthers were ambushed by Oakland, California police. Cleaver's consequent exile, fearing he would be murdered in prison, set the stage for the COINTELPRO operations that eventually shattered the party.

Extra-Legal Force and Violence

Government instigation of "private violence":

FBI records reveal covert maneuvers to get the Mafia to move against Black activist-comedian Dick Gregory and the entire leadership of the Communist Party-USA. The Bureau also used infiltrators, forgeries, and anonymous notes and telephone calls to incite violent rivals to attack Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and other targets. One COINTELPRO report boasted that "shootings, beatings and a high degree of unrest continue to prevail in the ghetto area...it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program."

Covert government aid to right-wing vigilantes:

The FBI subsidized, armed, directed, and protected a sordid array of racist, right-wing thugs. One such group, a "Secret Army Organization of California ex-Minutemen led by FBI operative Howard Godfrey, beat up Chicano activists, tore apart the offices of the San Diego Street Journal and the Movement for a Democratic Military, and tried to kill a prominent anti-war organizer. Defectors from the Legion of Justice, a Chicago-based vigilante band that wrecked movement bookstores, newspaper offices, and film studios, testified that they had been secretly armed and financed by the U.S. Army's 113th Military Intelligence Group and that their targets had been selected by the Chicago Police Department red squad.

The FBI's main right-wing beneficiary was the Ku Klux Klan. In 1961, the FBI supplied the advance information that enabled the Klan to brutalize freedom riders as they arrived in various Southern cities. FBI operative Gary Thomas Rowe shot one of the guns when the KKK murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzo in 1963. He helped plan the bombing that took the lives of four Black children at a Birmingham, Alabama, church that same year. By 1965, some 20 percent of Klan members were on the FBI payroll. Many occupied positions of power: "FBI agents reached leadership positions in seven of the fourteen Klan groups across the country, headed one state Klan organization and even created a splinter Klan group which grew to nearly two hundred members.

Government burglaries and vandalism:

FBI agents are trained for surreptitious entries by formal instruction in lock-picking and related techniques. In 1976 the FBI reported that it had carried out "at least 238" burglaries against fifteen unidentified domestic organizations from 1942 until 1968. While "Do Not File" procedures for destroying records of burglaries as well as cover-ups of field data preclude an accurate compilation, a more realistic estimate of burglaries to steal information and forcible entries to install microphones from the early forties until the early seventies against domestic targets is close to 7,500. Former agents confessed to thousands of "black bag jobs" in which the FBI broke into dissidents' offices, homes, and cars. Some of these burglaries were carried out stealthily, to copy records, steal papers, sabotage machinery, or plant bugs, drugs, or guns, without the targets' knowledge. Many other bag jobs were blatantly crude, designed to intimidate activists and their supporters and included numerous acts of vandalism, ranging from broken windows to fire-bombings.

Government assaults, beatings, and killings:

Under the guise of enforcing the law, FBI agents and police officers routinely roughed up 1960s activists and often threatened or injured them. Violence was used to disperse 1960s demonstrations, with provocative acts by under-cover agents often providing a convenient pretext. Southern police attacks on civil rights workers in the early 1960s have been widely publicized. Contrary to the impression promoted by the media, however, 1960s police brutality against political protesters was not limited to any one period or region. As progressive momentum surged in the final years of the decade, "Southern justice" spread throughout the country. Unarmed demonstrators were attacked by police and national guardsmen in Ohio, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, California, and Puerto Rico as well as Mississippi, and North Carolina. Thousands were beaten and injured. Hundreds were wounded and hospitalized. At last 17 were killed.

Political assassination:

While activists from all walks of life were randomly beaten and killed by police and guardsmen, Black leaders targeted under COINTELPRO faced "neutralization" through premeditated murder.

Examples of Activities Against Target Groups

Anti-war and New Left movements:

The Government engaged in covert action to suppress the New Left and antiwar movements 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. In May 1972, Bill Lemmer, Southern Regional Coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a key group in the convention protest coalition, surfaced as an undercover FBI operative. Lemmer's false testimony enabled the Bureau to haul the VVAW's national leadership before a grand jury hundreds of miles away during the week of the convention.

FBI efforts to put the VVAW "out of business" were later confirmed by another ex-operative, Joe Burton of Tampa, Florida, who 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. They 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 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. 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 en route 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 over-dosing 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.

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 the 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.

In 1979, government operatives played key roles in the massacre of communist labor organizers during a multi-racial anti-Klan march in Greensboro, NC. 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 (ATF) undercover agent Bernard Butkovich. Though the FBI, police and the ATF 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 (AFSCME) 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.

Native American movement:

In 1973, the FBI led a para-military 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 (Guar-dian 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 FBI launched a complementary program of psychological warfare 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 farms" 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.

FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul "Sky-horse" 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." The accusations against the defendants were widely publicized through nationwide media coverage, but the fact that they were subsequently cleared of all charges received little notice in the press. 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 national security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an under-cover operative for the FBI. 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. Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on June 13, 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 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. Pelteir's conviction, based on perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was upheld on appeal. 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.

Black movement:

In the 1970s, targets of covert action ranged from community-based groups to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers were hit with 768 arrests between May 1967 and December 1969 alone. In April 1968, Bobby Hutton, national finance minister of the Black Panther Party, was gunned down as he emerged unarmed, hands held high, from the police ambush which drove Eldridge Cleaver into exile. By the summer of 1969, the surviving non-imprisoned and non-exiled national officers of the Black Panther Party were on trial, along with the leaders of key Panther chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, and New Haven.

From April to December 1969, police raided Panther head-quarters in San Francisco, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Denver, San Diego, Sacramento and Los Angeles. Police raids frequently involved severe damage to Panther headquarters. Thus, during a raid at Sacramento in June, 1969, in search of an alleged sniper who was never found, police sprayed the building with tear gas, shot up the walls, broke typewriters and destroyed bulk food which the panthers were distributing free to ghetto children.

In Chicago, in December 1969, the FBI, police, and state's attorney joined forces in the cold-blooded murder of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton. He was a charismatic leader who developed a broad following in the Black community and organized the first multi-racial "rainbow coalition." In the late fall of 1969, he agreed to take the reins of the national party organization after its initial leaders were jailed or forced into exile. At that point, having failed in its efforts to get Hampton rubbed out by local street gangs, the FBI arranged to have the job done by a special squad of police assigned to the state's attorney's office.

The Bureau provided a detailed floor plan of Hampton's home marked to show where Hampton slept. Its paid informer, William O'Neal, Hampton's personal bodyguard, drugged Hampton's KoolAid so he would remain unconscious through the night. As the Panthers slept, O'Neal slipped out and a 14-man hit squad armed with automatic weapons crashed into Hampton's home and pumped in over 200 rounds of ammunition. When their fire subsided, Hampton and Mark Clark lay dead and seven other Panthers were wounded.

Despite an elaborate law enforcement cover-up, Hampton's death was found to be the result, not of a shoot-out as claimed by the authorities, but of a carefully orchestrated, Vietnam-style "search and destroy" mission. These thoroughly documented findings, viewed in the context of the whole history of COINTELPRO, lend credence to the widely held, enduring suspicion that the FBI or CIA were also behind the assassination of the two most important progressive U.S. leaders of the decade, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In September 1970, during raids on Panther headquarters in Philadelphia, police ransacked the office, ripped out plumbing and chopped up and carted away furniture. Six Panthers were led into the street, placed against a wall and stripped as Police Chief Frank Rizzo boasted to newsmen, "Imagine the big Black Panthers with their pants down."

The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panther?s 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, 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.

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 Erlich-man 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 "Jahil" 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.

In July 1970, in Houston, Texas, police assassinated Carl Hampton, Black leader of that city's burgeoning Peoples 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.

As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous Black economic and political institutions in the deep South, the FBI repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to buy land. On August 18, 1971, the FBI and police launched an armed predawn 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 FBI had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to assault a government agent.

In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI 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, NC, 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.

A comparable show of paramilitary might accompanied the October 18, 1984 arrest of eight New York City Black activists. A "Joint Anti-Terrorist Task Force" of more than 500 FBI and police agents, wielding machine guns and a bazooka, cordoned off entire city blocks to arrest law school graduates, city housing managers, college students, and a union steward. Promising community projects were disrupted while the eight were held for weeks without bail and placed for almost a year under strict curfew, while their co-workers were jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury. Acquitted of the major charges when jurors rejected the claims of a police infiltrator, the eight faced continued police harassment. One was later framed on bogus weapons charges, along with two other leaders of a Brooklyn community group, Black Men Against Crack.

In Alabama, in the mid-1980s, the FBI mounted an even more massive effort to intimidate grassroots supporters of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and to crush the emerging pro-Jackson Black Leadership based on the Campaign for a New South. Immediately after the September 1984 primaries in Alabama, as many as two hundred FBI agents swept through the five western Alabama Black Belt counties that had given their votes to Jesse Jackson, rousing elderly people from their beds in the middle of the night. They took about one thousand of them in police escorted buses to Mobile to be finger-printed, and suggested that their absentee ballots may have been tampered with by the civil rights workers who had secured their votes. The offices of civil rights workers were also raided and some of the documents they needed for the November elections were confiscated.

In January 1985, indictments for vote and mail fraud were handed down against eight of the Black Belts' most experienced organizers and political leaders. Although the defendants were acquitted of all major charges and their organization survived, the raids, interrogations, arrests, and trials took a heavy toll.

Chicano and Puerto Rican movements:

From 1972-74, La Raza Unida Party of Texas was plagued with repeated, unsolved political break-ins. Former government operative Eustacio "Frank" Martinez has admitted that 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 U.S. 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 Cresto-bal, in the second month of a six month term for civil dis-obedience, 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.

Similar FBI attacks were recently staged on the movement for Puerto Rico's independence from U.S. colonial rule. On August 30, 1985, hundreds of FBI agents, backed by military helicopters, rounded up prominent independentistas and charged them with being members of Los Macheteros, a clandestine independence organization. The raiders destroyed the editorial offices and printing presses of the progressive journal Pensamiento Critico and ransacked the homes and offices of 38 well known poets, artists, trade unionists, labor lawyers, and community organizers. Thirteen were held incommunicado for days and publicly branded as "terrorists." Finally charged with conspiracy to rob a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecti-cut, nine were kept in U.S. jails for more than a year, two for nearly three years, under new federal preventive detention laws. Although the defendants are Spanish speaking, the court acceded to the prosecution's demand that they be tried in English, more than 1,000 miles from their families and homeland. Pretrail hearings implicated the FBI in falsified reports, alteration of evidence, burglaries, illegal surveillance, and intimidation of witnesses.

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. 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 Washington, DC. 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.

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.

Central America anti-intervention groups:

In January 1988, the people of the United States learned of a secret nationwide FBI campaign against the domestic opponents of U.S. policy in Central America. Government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information act show that from 1981 through at least 1985, the FBI infiltrated the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CSPES) and disrupted its work all across the country. The investigation eventually reached into nearly every sector of the anti-intervention movement, from the Maryknoll Sisters, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the New Jewish Agenda to the United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd, and U.S. Representative Pat Schroeder and Jim Wright.

Methods used: putting out bogus literature under the CISPES name, burglarizing CISPES members' homes, and paying right-wing students to start fights at CISPES rallies; as well as the routine exchange of information about U.S. and Central American activists with the Salvadoran National Guard, sponsor of that country's death squads.

From the National Security Council's offices in the White House basement, Lt. Col. Oliver North funded and orchestrated break-ins and other covert activities to defeat congressional critics of U.S. policy in Central America and neutralize grassroots protest.

In 1984, government informers surfaced as the main witnesses in the federal prosecution of clergy and lay workers providing sanctuary for refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. They testified that they were paid by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to infiltrate church services, Bible classes, and sanctuary support networks. They were part of "Operation Sojourner," the U.S. Justice Department's countrywide crackdown on sanctuary churches and organizations.

Other forms of government harassment hit activists who spent time in Nicaragua or Cuba during the 1980s. Travelers and travel agencies were audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Private papers were copied or confiscated at the border. Mail arrived late and open, or never arrived. Returnees' homes, jobs, churches, and communities were hounded by the FBI.

Anti-apartheid groups:

In 1981, the FBI and police infiltrated and disrupted the Capital District Coalition Against Apartheid and Racism (CDCAAR). At 3 a.m. on the day of the group's protest against the U.S. tour of the South African Springbok rugby team, FBI agents and state and local police broke into the home of CDCAAR leader Vera Michelson. Supposedly acting on an anonymous FBI informer's false report that the anti-apartheid activists were stockpiling weapons, the officers burst into Michelson's bedroom, put a shotgun to her head, and forced her to crawl to another part of the apartment where she was handcuffed to a table. They then ransacked the apartment, confiscating CDCAAR files along with private papers and address books. Michelson and two other organizers were detained on bogus charges and kept from participating in the demonstration. They later learned that the same FBI infiltrator had spread false reports of planned violence in order to discourage participants in the demonstration.

Palestinian self-determination supporters:

Similar break-ins were experienced throughout 1987-88 by U.S. supporters of Palestinian self-determination. The FBI, INS, and Los Angeles police arrested eight activists for deportation as "terrorists." The evidence against them consisted solely of photos showing that they helped distribute magazines published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As the eight appealed the INS ruling, their homes were burglarized and boxes of files on their case were stolen from the cars of American Friends Service Committee staff and others active in their defense. Secret INS plans uncovered in February 1988 called for thousands more U.S. Arab-American activists to be rounded up and deported as "alien terrorists and undesirables."

The Underground Press:

The underground press, a network of some 400 radical weeklies and several national news services, once boasted a combined readership of close to 30 million. In the late 1960s, government agents raided the offices of alternative newspapers across the country in purported pursuit of drugs and fugitives. In the process, they destroyed typewriters, cameras, printing presses, layout equipment, business records, and research files, and roughed up and jailed staffers on bogus charges. Street sellers of underground newspapers were routinely rounded up when their paper was about to come out.

The coordinator of the PEN American Center's Freedom to Write Committee recorded the experience of one alternative newspaper, Kudzu: by 1968, the newspaper had survived a conviction on obscenity charges, the arrest of salespeople, the confiscation of cameras, and even eviction from its offices. On October 8, 1968, eighteen staff members and supporters of Kudzu were attacked and beaten by Jackson deputy sheriffs. In 1970, Kudzu was put under direct surveillance by the FBI. For more than two months FBI agents made daily searches without warrants. On October 24 and 25, Kudzu sponsored a Southern regional conference of the Underground Press Syndicate. The night before the conference the FBI and Jackson detectives searched the Kudzu offices twice. During the search, an FBI agent threatened to kill Kudzu staffers. On the morning of October 26, FBI agents again searched the offices. That evening local police entered the building, held its eight occupants at gun point, produced a bag of marijuana, then arrested them. Agents of the FBI pointed guns in the faces of staff members, told them told "punks like you don't have any rights" and threatened to shoot them in the street.

Meanwhile, the FBI was persuading record companies to withdraw lucrative advertising and arranging for printers, suppliers, and distributors to drop underground press accounts. With their already shaky operations in disarray, the papers and news services were easy targets for a final phase of disruption. Forged correspondence, anonymous accusations, and infiltrators' manipulation provoked a flurry of wild charges and counter charges that played a major role in bringing many of these promising endeavors to a premature end.

The Cia?s Domestic Intelligence Operations

The 1967 press disclosures and subsequent congressional investigations and documents released under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts and lawsuits have revealed a long train of CIA involvement in American life.

CIA influence in civil, cultural, and labor groups:

Bet-ween 1952 and 1966, the National Student Association (NSA) received an estimated $3,300,000 in funding from the CIA which, during certain years, amounted to as much as 80% of NSA's entire budget. This resulted in the cooperation of NSA officials and representatives who influenced the policies of the organization in directions favored by the Agency. In addition the CIA provided, through a variety of foundation conduits, funds for a considerable number of labor, business, church, university, and cultural groups. A minimal estimate of $12,442,925 was secretly channeled to these groups by the CIA. The anti-Communist and highly influential Congress for Cultural Freedom, a private group of intellectuals, writers, and artists, from 1950 to 1966 received over $1 million in secret subsidies from the CIA. Through the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development and other domestic labor organizations operating in the international sphere, the Agency supported anti-Communist labor unions and officers in Europe, Africa, and South America.

CIA's mind-control research:

From 1949 through 1972, the Agency used U.S. academic institutions, prisons, mental hospitals, medical and research facilities as laboratories for testing its mind-control and brain-washing techniques, using drug-induced behavior modification, electrode implant and sensory deprivation procedures, sometimes without the knowledge of the subjects, and frequently without their "informed consent." In one project, LSD subjects were recruited from bars and lured to plush hotels for sexual behavior studies with prostitutes while under the influence of the hallucinogen (researchers watched through two-way mirrors). In 1977 the CIA notified eighty academic institutions that, during the fifties and sixties, they had been involved in some way in mind-control research.

CIA's domestic propaganda activities: Beginning before 1950, and extending over a period of twenty-five years, a large number of American journalists abroad (including correspondents for the New York Times, CBS News, Time magazine, and many other organizations) served as conduits for planted CIA stories, shared information with other correspondents for general-circulation news organizations, functioned as under-cover contacts and were paid on a regular basis, in some instances with the full knowledge of their employers. About twenty-five part-time journalists (freelancers and stringers) were employed by the Agency on a regular salaried basis. In addition, major news organizations (such as the New York Times) allowed CIA employees to pose as clerks or part-time correspondents and provided cover for others at the Agency's request. Propaganda and "disinformation" disseminated abroad through the CIA's world-wide network of news services was unwittingly reprinted as bona fide news by U.S. newspapers. Through a project initiated on April 1, 1967, the Agency directed its "propaganda assets" in the field to take actions to discredit critics of the Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination through book reviews and feature articles, not only attacking their conclusions but suggesting that they were subversively motivated. Material was transmitted that included excerpts from countersubversive files about the authors of books challenging the Report's conclusion.

In 1950, the CIA established (through a grant of $300,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) the Center for International Studies which turned out books both for public distribution and, in a more confidential version, for dissemination in intelligence circles. This program, funded by substantial grants, continued until 1966. But it was only a small part of a huge (allegedly still continuing) propaganda effort that has resulted in the production or subsidization of more than 1,250 books concealing the identity of the sponsor or author or both.

The CIA in domestic surveillance:

In the late sixties and early seventies recruitment and other university-related activities also led to considerable CIA campus involvement with both students and faculty. In addition to monitoring faculty members under consideration for grants and overseas "tasking," the CIA maintained confidential relationships with professors and administrators for recruitment purposes, and used covert allies and agents to identify, and recommend for employment or other relationships, campus-based prospects who were then investigated. The CIA's "Operation CHAOS" began in 1967 to "uncover foreign influence behind domestic unrest". They compiled target lists of U.S. citizens for domestic surveillance. Between 1967 and 1973, the CIA had amassed some 10,000 files on individuals and over 100 domestic groups, some of which ran to several volumes. In addition, a computerized index system (HYDRA) permitted prompt retrieval of over 300,000 references to American citizens and organizations. Their "Civil Disturbance" list included individuals and organizations active in anti-war and civil rights movements, a mix of radicals, liberals, celebrities, and ordinary citizens involved in one-time protests, and organizations ranging from the liberal left to pacifist. Target organizations included Students for a Democratic Society, Women's Strike for Peace, Young Workers Liberation League, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, Youth International Party, the women's liberation movement, the Black Panther Party, the Cuban Venceremos Brigade, and Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam.

Operation CHAOS was fed by other CIA domestic intelligence programs such as the its "Domestic Contact Service." Organized to collect foreign intelligence information on an open basis from Americans through the CIA's field offices, it was used as a conduit for information about the foreign involvement of domestic dissidents, and also as a channel for background material without foreign implications.

The CIA also received information from local and state intel-ligence agencies, used the agencies for "cover" in the form of badges and identification cards as well as other services. In return, the CIA offered courses of instruction, briefings, demonstrations, and seminars for various police departments throughout the U.S. It provided "safe houses," transportation, gifts, gratuities, electronic equipment, transmitters, audio devices, cameras, and gas masks. In one case agents were sent to evaluate a police department's intelligence-gathering capability and make recommendations for improvements. In return the police agency furnished the CIA with reports on groups planning to demonstrate, a detailed report on a newly formed radical association and files on a number of individuals active in the peace movement.

The CIA's domestic surveillance techniques included intelligence satellite photographs of demonstrations, (furnished by the top-secret National Reconnaissance Office), the use of informers to monitor open meetings and infiltrate organizations and university campuses (using Agency employees or relatives, outside firms and fronts). A covert action project of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division may well have been responsible for a wave of office burglaries, in 1969 and 1970, of the files and lists of a number of groups such as the United Servicemen's Fund, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and a variety of anti-war groups, including the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee in New York City.

Military Surveillance Of Civilian Politics

By the late sixties, the intelligence units of the armed forces had become, next to the FBI, the most important single component in the domestic intelligence community: a huge intelligence system operated by the Army itself without civilian authorization or control. The system as a whole was marked by a quality of excess reflected most notably in its gargantuan coverage. Individuals from every area of dissent, leaders and followers, were surveilled and dossiered; literally every organization of a liberal or radical hue was similarly covered.

Army intelligence structures have unlimited funds, ample field manpower, specialized command personnel, planning and training resources, and the most sophisticated communications and data-processing capability. The Army's expertise also embraces the social sciences: information theory, behavior analysis, and social indicators. They have the highest level of expertise in ferreting out dissent.

They also cooperate extensively with civilian law enforcement agencies, and can monitor private radio transmissions, and intercept international communications.

Historical roots:

The Army's history of involvement in civilian politics began during World War I. Both openly as policeman and covertly, it monitored political dissent. Surveillance of civilians had twin objectives: prevention of troop disaffection and the protection from an attack on the nations domestic resources and morale that might jeopardize victory in the field. Activities ranged from "slacker" raids to strike-breaking. Army Intelligence operatives collaborated with federal, state and local government agencies as well as private vigilante networks. "Disloyalty" was seen as subversion, spying as patriotic. After the War, the Army did not curb its broad counter-subversive involvement, but responded to threatened cuts in personnel and appropriations by applying directly to employers of labor, convincing them that such cuts would leave the country prey to revolution by subversive strikers. The immediate focus of intelligence operations at that time was labor unrest, the long term objective: holding off a revolution. They developed a network of liaisons with law enforcement and National Guard units, industry, veteran's organizations and patriotic groups where they encouraged surveillance and the development of file collections, spreading the ideology that counter-subversion activities were needed to monitor radicalism and peace movements.

Civil unrest during the Depression of the thirties both intensified and broadened Army intelligence collection; and during World War II, intelligence activities again increased. Units engaged in extensive tapping and bugging both on their own and in cooperation with other surveillance organizations. Nor was there a post-war respite, the cold war and the Korean War kept the pot boiling.

Army intelligence allied itself with the ultra-right as part of a larger effort to entrench military power by exploiting fears of subversion. Agents engaged in a military propa-ganda campaign to "educate" civilians on military defense, communism, and the cold war through a series of Army sponsored indoctrination sessions: seminars, conferences, speeches and rallies all over the country, with audiences ranging from school children to bankers. Their message: We are losing to the communists; civilians have a choice between appeasement or surrender and all-out struggle for survival.

Army intelligence personnel issued weekly summaries on domestic subversion, collected information about the Army's critics, especially the critics of the anti-subversive "educa-tional" campaign, helped plan the seminars and forums, and checked on proposed speakers. The National War College trained officers for civilian indoctrination, aided by collaborating organizations (i.e. the Institute for American Strategy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, chambers of commerce, and right-wing groups). After the 50's the Army had to tone down its indoctrination campaign, but its domestic intelligence activities continued undiminished.

Army steps-up covert activities in the 1960s:

The Army used the increase in civil unrest of the sixties (race riots, criticism of the Vietnam War and anti-War protests) to justify augmenting its historic counter-subversive mission and vastly increasing its intelligence operations. The formal justifications of preparation for emergency troop call-outs and the monitoring of threats to the military function itself were no more than pretexts. The scope and intensity of the Army's intelligence activities clearly established that they were purely forms of aggression against legitimate political expression. Caution fell prey to the ideological hostility released by the eruptions of the sixties. According to Army Intelligence, riots and demonstrations were no less than "urban guerrilla warfare" instigated and directed by communist agitators, part of the "political weapons system of the international Communist movement." Therefore, their stated mission included both predicting when riots would occur by compiling "relevant data," and preparing to isolate and remove the "3 to 5 percent" hard-core agitators from the mass who were viewed as "harmless."

As early as 1964, they began operations in Texas and Oklahoma (two states not known for their high potential for insurrection) with intensive surveillance of individuals and organizations such as the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship and the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks.

After the King assassination riots, even more expansive intelligence operations were prepared. Field commanders were ordered to collect information about political activities in all cities where there was seen to be a potential for civil disturbance, giving top priority to university campuses. Every intelligence unit in the country monitored college-level institutions in its area, and in some instances, even high schools. Regional and field offices spied on local ad hoc groups, meetings and demonstrations.

Targets included an anti-war meeting in a Washington, DC, Episcopal church, demonstrations by a welfare mothers' organization, a conference of dissenting Priests protesting the Archbishop?s position on birth control, a Halloween party for elementary school children suspected of harboring a local dissident, a meeting of a sanitation workers' union, a Southern Leadership Conference, Upward Bound, an anti-war vigil in a chapel, a Godfrey Cambridge concert, the African-American Student Movement, American Friends Service Committee, American Nazi Party, Americans for Democratic Acton, Black Panther party, Congress of Racial Equality, Chicago Area Draft Resisters, Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, SANE, Progressive Labor Party, The Resistance, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Students for a Democratic Society, War Resisters League and the Young Socialist Alliance.

Army intelligence personnel and equipment:

The Army had a nationwide network of some 1,500 agents, stationed in over 300 posts scattered throughout the country and organized into seven Military Intelligence Groups. They planned, programmed, processed, interpreted, stored and disseminated civilian-focused intelligence. By the fall of 1968, the personnel assigned to monitor domestic disturbance and dissent outnumbered those covering matters of counter-intelligence interest emanating from any other area of the world.

A 180-man army command center was created in 1968 in the wake of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. After a temporary stay in make-shift offices, in 1969 it was housed in a specially constructed Pentagon basement war room (at a cost of $2,700,000). The room was equipped with teletype networks linking intelligence installations all over the country, a special hook-up to emergency centers, situation maps, closed-circuit television, hot-lines, an illuminated switchboard, and a computerized data center.

In the field, the larger urban centers mirrored, on a smaller scale, the Pentagon war room command center. But even the smaller field intelligence units had extraordinarily comprehensive and sophisticated communication grids in preparation for a lightning-fast response to civil disturbance: electronic links to virtually all other intelligence collection posts in the country, hot-lines, teletypes, and tie-ins with local law enforcement telephones and radio transmissions. In some cities, these lines had extended to every civilian police precinct station and were manned at both ends by Army agents.

They also had highly sophisticated surveillance gear: videotape equipment (mobile and stationary), citizen band broadcast interceptors, miniaturized transmitters with hidden throat mikes, tape recorders, cameras with a variety of lenses, binoculars, lock-picking kits, lie detectors, and inter-view rooms with two-way mirrors. Since covert methods were routinely used, agents were also provided with special kits to forge such documents as driver's licenses, registration certificates, and identification cards. (Agents frequently used a media cover, equipped with bogus credentials as reporters or photo-graphers.)

Intelligence collected by operatives in the field was transmitted through "spot reports" in standardized formats. A more detailed "Agent's Report" form permitted the enclosure of documents and photographs. The stress on speed also encouraged the use of telephone reports from field agents to local headquarters, where they were reduced to written form and then transmitted by teletype up the chain of command. At headquarters the mass of incoming reports was sifted, filed, prepared for computer storage, converted into daily and weekly summaries and teletyped to a worldwide network of users.

Army Intelligence files:

Information gathered in the field was ultimately stored in one of two elaborate file systems located at Forts Holabird and Monroe. The Fort Holabird collection included about 8 million dossiers, augmented by a number of satellite compilations dealing with civilian political activity. This data was stored in two computer systems, two non-computerized collections, and a library of documents, photographs, and videotapes. Of the two non-computerized files, one was the "subversive" file, which included dossiers on elected officials and organizations. It included all political groups over the entire left-liberal spectrum. The second contained the 1,200 field reports received each month: "Incident" files (descriptions and summaries of demonstrations, meetings, disturbances, etc.) from which the most important material was gleaned for computer entry.

The computerized files organized and made instantly retrievable minute details about the time, place, setting, and participants identified with virtually every public protest activity in the United States. They contained information about some 770 organizations of every political shade and interest (some unconnected with public affairs altogether) identified by categories of "target interest" and listing every organization's officers (chairman, secretary, treasurer, and steering committee members).

Biographical data stored by the computer could also be independently retrieved in the form of lists of individuals along with details of their personal lives. Purporting to deal with "hard core militants and civil disturbance individuals," the file collections indiscriminately ran the gamut from priests to comedians, from supporters of Senator Eugene McCar-thy to Weathermen and large numbers of public officials.

The data stored on computers at Fort Monroe was organized into three categories: incidents, personalities and organizations. With unimportant exceptions, it duplicated the data at Fort Holabird. This branch of Army intelligence also published a six-volume set of books on "personalities of interest," summarizing the political associations and activities of some 5,500 subjects, including picketers, peace protesters, vigilers, and writers of letters to the editor.

Army intelligence also maintained a microfilm archive which was used to service its research and analysis functions. It contained the contents of some 17,500 documents broken down into entries of 189,000 activities and events: 113,250 organizational and 152,000 personality references covering both domestic and foreign matters. These vast holdings were supplemented by file collections (some also quite extensive) in the 300 regional, field and resident offices scattered over the country.

Army intelligence publications:

Daily, weekly, and monthly teletyped intelligence bulletins were issued from the Pentagon's war room. Each Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence unit in the field, and some National Guard units, also published monthly intelligence summaries in booklet form. The range of distribution was enormous, extending far beyond the population of possible users. If a high school class in Evanston, Illinois, demonstrated against the war, agents in Europe, Panama, and Hawaii could read about it almost as soon as it was reported to Fort Holabird. Army intelligence also provided a report disseminated both within the intelligence structure and to other military personnel, containing summaries of information about particular targets. The most important single intelligence reference work produced by the Army was a six-volume set entitled "Individuals Active in Civil Disturbance." It contained profiles of some 1,000 individuals, each one consisting of photographs and 7 descriptive listings: name, date and place of birth, address, occupation, description, arrests, and organizations. Another intelligence product was a two-volume set of books in loose leaf format to permit periodic updating. Entitled "Civil Disturbances and Dissidence," Volume I focused on "Cities and Organizations of Interest," while Volume II covered "Personalities of Interest." This second volume contained 345 biographical sketches, including comprehensive data on the target (i.e. results of medical examinations by physicians and psychiatrists, income, credit information, sexual aberrations, family life, and background material). Supplementing this material was a collection of summaries dealing with the activities, structure, goals and methods of over 100 organizations, widely diversified in size and influence.

Unsuccessful attempts at legislative control:

In December 1970, a directive was issued confining the Army's civilian intelligence program to targets exhibiting "conduct that threatens a legitimate palpable Army interest." For the first time, responsibility for the conduct of domestic surveillance was lodged, by a positive directive, in the civilian Secretary of Defense. But the new provisions still retained the potential for abuse. The Defense Secretary was given carte blanche to authorize the most questionable form of surveillance: under-cover penetration.

The Army responded with tenacity and evasiveness to attempts to force the destruction of data collected on civilian targets. They have the technological capability (including computerized data encoding to thwart access by outsiders) to maintain files secretly. If history is a guide, the Army has not only secretly retained their files, but also provided copies of their collections to supplement file holdings of civilian intelligence agencies on the federal, state and local levels.

In the fall of 1976, the White House countermanded the 1970 directive limiting military involvement in civilian politics by officially assigning the job of monitoring and suppressing dissent to the Army. Their intelligence operations were integrated with civilian intelligence units (FBI, CIA, Secret Service, state and local police, national guard, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration). Army, Special Forces and other elite military units began to train local police for counterinsurgency and to intensify their own preparations, following the guidelines of secret Pentagon contingency plans, "Garden Plot" and "Cable Splicer." Training included the use of "Low Intensity Conflict" techniques (i.e., infiltration and psychological warfare) for continuous covert operations against dissident groups to "prevent the develop-ment of any mass movement" (see note 98).

In the 1980s, the military again increased its "counter-subversive" activities against U.S. citizens and these practices were institutionalized through Executive Order No. 12333, which legalized counterintelligence activities within the United States on the part of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

The Federal Emergency Management Administration also developed contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, establishing martial law, and using the Army to round up and hold political dissidents in concentration camps in the event of "national opposition against a U.S. military invasion abroad."

Internal Revenue Service Intelligence Activities

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has 700 offices spread over the nation and some 2,800 special agents. It collects and files information about the private affairs of some 80 million individuals who file tax returns every year. Form 1040, the standard taxpayer's return form, discloses the taxpayer's name, address, social security number, marital status, number and names of children and other dependents, as well as the taxpayer's entire gross income. The "Schedule A" form discloses data about the groups or causes the taxpayer has supported, his union membership, and whether he is under medical care. In addition to the information contained in the taxpayer's return, audits and investigations yield mountains of additional information on demand without the requirement of a subpoena.

The IRS's Intelligence Division unit also runs an elaborate undercover surveillance system manned by its special agents, trained in schools that teach standard courses such as cover protection, the management of infiltrators and the use of recording equipment. The undercover capability of the IRS outweighs that of all other federal civilian agencies combined. They command an extraordinary arsenal of investigative techniques. Electronic surveillance, decoys, mail covers, and related practices are a part of everyday intelligence operations. They also maintain a second network of non-employee "informers" engaged in illegal activities and financial corruption. They have an estimated annual outlay of $2 million in secret payments for informers, cover arrangements, witness protection and the outfitting of undercover vehicles. The basic thrust of intelligence is the development of sanctions against proscribed targets. Because the function of the IRS is not confined to passive data collection, it is a vital asset for the entire intelligence community. Few punishments are as efficient for aggressive intelligence purposes as the pocket-book sanctions commanded by the IRS.

IRS use of economic sanctions to suppress dissent:

Under U.S. law, nonprofit organizations (i.e. charitable, religious, and educational associations) engaged in "activities considered important to civil and religious life" are granted exemption from taxation. The laws stipulate that organizations, to receive tax-exempt status, do not devote a "substantial part" of their activities to "carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation."

Data generated by the tax-exemption process (completed IRS application forms, returns, and investigative reports) enable intelligence units to identify a group's officers, sources of funding (including the names of contributors and the amount of their contributions) and verify the group's objectives.

Even more important than the information yield is the punitive potential: the granting or retention of an exemption can become vital to the group's existence. Without the tax-exempt status, they may be financially crippled or unable to continue operations at all. A group's policies and programs may also be influenced by the threat, actual or feared, of an exemption being withdrawn.

Beginning in the late forties, the IRS revoked, without a hearing, the exemptions of all organizations on the Attorney General's list of "subversive groups," including the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the School of Jewish Studies, the Hollywood Writers' Guild, the Ohio School of Social Science and others. In the Internal Security Act of 1950, Congress provided for the denial of exemptions to Communistfront and Communist-action organizations. The IRS interpreted the law as a mandate to withhold exemptions from groups which, in its own view, were subversive. Grounds for revoking tax exempt status: "pursuing objectives through other than educational means, engaging to a substantial degree in dissemination of controversial and partisan propaganda, and attempting to influence, directly and indirectly, the policies and/or actions of governments and government officials."

Congressional anti-subversive committees also ordered the IRS to investigate liberal foundations and leftist groups to determine whether tax-exempt organizations were "using their resources for un-American and subversive activities." Even though such investigations did not always succeed in stripping groups of their tax-exempt status, they invariably produced disruption and substantially hampered their functioning.

IRS history of "passive" intelligence activities:

Beginning in the late forties and continuing into the fifties, the IRS responded with investigations and audits to "squeal" letters by anonymous informants (sometimes inspired by IRS field agents) charging tax delinquencies against unpopular individuals and groups. When requested, they also supplied the FBI with lists of contributors to "suspect" organizations (drawn from a group's tax returns or application for exemptions). The anti-subversive activities of the IRS increased in 1954, when the Internal Security Division was organized as a special intelligence unit of the Department of Justice. It not only channeled FBI requests for tax data to the IRS, but began to request IRS audits and investigations of political subjects on its own.

Most cases of IRS intelligence abuses in the fifties did not reach the courts because targets of investigation couldn't prove the IRS's political intent, or they lacked funds for a legal challenge. But it was established in 1968, that the IRS could not legally provide the FBI with free access to tax data. Reforms were implemented specifying that the IRS determine that the information would not be used for improper purposes before releasing tax files to the FBI.

The Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice helped side-step these new regulations by channeling the FBI's request for data to the IRS with the assertion that they were "necessary in connection with an official matter before this office involving internal security." The IRS was thus absolved from fulfilling the requirements specified in the reform procedures and its cooperation with the FBI continued unchanged.

The CIA was also accorded cooperation both before and after the 1968 reforms. They made requests and received reports from specially designated liaison personnel within the IRS. These IRS employees took care of the tax problems of CIA targets, supplied requested tax returns to CIA personnel and furnished information needed for operational purposes such as establishing the cover of CIA operatives. This was all done without keeping a record of activities or requests.

IRS becomes more aggressive in suppressing dissent in the '60s:

The IRS had a long history of involvement in counter-subversive intelligence practices, but their primary role had been to passively share information with other government intelligence agencies. In response to the protest movements of the sixties, the corps of informers used by the IRS was enlarged, increasing both the amount of information obtained and the number of audits against individuals and organizations. In the late sixties, as a result of pressure from Congress and the White House, the IRS was more completely politicized and became a principle intelligence unit. The White House routinely issued executive orders granting anti-subversive Congressional committees access to tax returns, although these panels had no legitimate interest in tax matters and had repeatedly used tax data for harassment, particularly in the exemption area. In 1969, a group of six conservative White House staffers (including Tom Charles Huston and Patrich Buchanan) developed a program to replace what it considered to be a "liberal intellectual establishment" (headed by tax-exempt groups such as the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, Potomac Associates, and the Stern Fund), with a new grouping of conservative organizations.

To achieve this change, the committee proposed to end the flow of contracts, grants and other benefits to the liberal groups and to reexamine their tax exemptions, claiming "tax-exempt funds may be supporting activist groups engaged in stimulating riots both in Congress and within our inner cities." The committee was given free access to tax data. Committee requests for information on specific targets were also seen as directives for the IRS to get busy on their own to investigate them. Thus the IRS began diverting its investigative resources to non-tax related enterprises, a use of tax sanctions to check activism.

In August 1970 the IRS launched, for the first time in its history, a unit with a political intelligence focus: the Special Service Staff (SSS). The new unit was totally lacking in justification from a revenue gathering standpoint, but it institutionalized the IRS's role in counter-subversive intelligence.

The official "mission" of the SSS was to investigate "individuals involved in tax strikes, tax resisters and tax protester activities," but the IRS interpreted this as a mandate "to neutralize an insidious threat to the internal security of this country...to coordinate activities in all Compliance Divisions involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical and similar type organizations; to collect basic intelligence data, and to ensure that the requirements of the IRS Code concerning such organizations has been complied with." The unit was a hit squad, functioning in the tax field against proscribed organizations (whether tax-exempt or not), their officers, supporters, and members, as well as individual activist. The absence of mission guideposts or defined operational standards left agents free to employ whatever means were at their disposal to "save an imperiled nation."

Since the operation was of questionable legitimacy, secrecy was imperative. The name was changed several times to decrease the possibility of recognizable identification of its purpose and pursuits, finally ending in the selection of the particularly innocuous "Special Service Staff." But the unit still had problems keeping its activities secret: whistle blowers provided information on SSS activities which landed them in court. Attempting in court to justify their "illegal" intelligence activities, the SSS adopted the argument that "there is evidence of transfers of large amounts of money to and from the U.S. used to establish and organize groups with the view of overthrowing this government." Citing national security again as a justification, the IRS continued their intelligence operations.

IRS political intelligence files:

The SSS, in four years of operation, built a collection of files on 8,585 individuals and 2,873 organizations, acquiring most of them from the FBI. Documents received between October 1969 and November 1973 totaled 11,818 reports on both individuals and organizations. Further contributions came from the Justice Department's Inter-Divisional Intelligence Unit (computer listings of radical leftist and civic leader suspects); congressional intelligence material (from the House Internal Security Committee?s vast collection on "suspect" targets); Army, Navy and Air Force military intelligence units; the State Department; Information Digest (a private intelligence publication); state and local law enforcement officials; and ad hoc sources (i.e. the Subcommittee on Foundations and the House Select Small Business Committee). But the SSS's most important source of file material was the Social Security Administration, which provided both identifying data and information on wage payments made to targets. 41% of the SSS's file subjects were minority groups and activists in race relations movements; 29% were drawn from the anti-war and New Left movements. Organizational targets included the National Council of Churches, the Americans for Democratic Action, the Fund for the Republic, the American Library Association, Common Cause, the Carnegie and Ford Foundations, the Black Panthers, the Ku Klux Klan, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Friends of the FBI.

Individual files were equally ecumenical, covering a range of occupations: educators, college presidents, symphony conductors, entertainers, comedians, priests, ministers, rabbis, conservative newspaper columnists, editors and pub-lishers, women's liberation figures, labor union organizers and officers, solicitors and contributors to defense funds, tax attorneys, candidates for public office and elected officials.

In 1973, the IRS's new Intelligence Gathering and Retrieval Service also became fully operational. By January 1975 about one-half million target files (individuals and organizations) were stored in the computerized indices maintained in the 45 IRS district offices and interlocked in a network covering the entire nation. This new intelligence project was supposed to focus on the legitimate targets of organized crime, racketeering and corruption: "illegal enterprises generating hidden taxable income, and engaging in activities marked by highly sophisticated techniques for concealing huge profits." But "subversive activists" were also included in the target lists because they were said to use some of the same techniques for generating taxable income and hiding profits with the aim of "further breaking down the basic fibers of society."

In the late sixties, another branch of the IRS, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) division, originally set up to monitor illegal traffic in firearms and explosives was expanded to include intelligence gathering on activist groups. Using informers and infiltrators, they attempted to obtain evidence for the prosecution of targets for illegally purchasing weapons. ATF agents sometimes tried to entrap activists by proposing to illegally sell weapons to them. Informers also created disturbances within groups they infiltrated to disrupt and hamper group functioning, and tried to discredit them by urging violent methods as a means of achieving the groups goals.

The Role Of Congress In Surveillance

Congressional counter-subversive investigations have become institutionalized weapons in the resistance to movements for political change. They are essentially intelligence operations and are allied both with other intelligence units engaged in related activities and with right-wing lobbies and pressure groups: business interests, veterans organizations, fundamentalist churches, anti-Communist ideologues, civilian and military foreign policy hawks, defense contractors, and nativist ultras.

The stated purpose of Congressional counter-subversive investigations was to monitor organizations and their affiliates that sought to establish, or to assist in establishing, a "totalitarian dictatorship" (read "Communism") in the United States or to overthrow the government, not only by force but by "any unlawful means." In addition, they were authorized to police the activities of groups that used unlawful means "to obstruct or oppose the lawful authority of the Government of the United States in the execution of any law or policy affecting the internal security of the United States."

Congressional committees and commissions flourished between the wars, and were revitalized during the McCarthy era. Between 1918 and 1956, Senate investigations of communism were conducted by no less than eighteen standing committees and one select committee; and in the House by sixteen standing committees, seven special committees, and five select committees. From the twenties on, both state and federal legislative committees have engaged in a wide variety of counter-subversive intelligence practices.

The committees were staffed by corps of intelligence types, and anti-Communist bureaucrats. Key personnel typically consisted of former FBI agents, while lower echelons were staffed by recruits from police units, service organizations (Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion), and ultra-rightist supporters.

The integration movement sparked an increase in Congressional counter-subversive activities. But since dissent in the sixties was basically non-ideological, a justification had to be invented to also allow targeting non-communist organizations. The committees broadened their stated purpose to include monitoring and measuring degrees of "subversion" or communist influence in dissident groups.

The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations was commissioned in August 1967 to probe the "violence, unrest, vandalism, and disorders" then shaking the nation, but instead of exploring the causes of the unrest, the traditional counter-subversive scape-goating took place with a new, more punitive thrust. Senator John J. McClellan, head of the committee, developed behind-the-scenes operational liaisons with state and local police forces to harass leftist targets. Activities included a highly effective campaign to end scholarship grants and government assistance to students linked to campus disturbances.

In addition to tracing "subversive influences" on protest movements, Congressional committees worked ceaselessly to identify each participant. Staff members engaged in physical surveillance, photographed targets such as peace demonstrators and convention delegates and recruited informers. In addition, committees of both houses used their powers to gain access to bank records, leases, the names of applicants for post office boxes, tax returns, and passport files. They also used the resources and assets of the urban anti-subversive police units to acquire detailed police blotter-style IDs, biographies, and spates of photographs.

Between 1968 and 1972, a total of 378 identifying photographs, financial data of all kinds, and a fantastic variety of documents were collected: literature, private letters, maps, Xeroxed checks, informers' reports, surveillance logs, transcripts of interviews, membership lists, press releases, publication lists, invitations to conferences, minutes of meetings and lists of participants, lists of delegates to conferences, newsletters, rent receipts, flyers, file transcripts, constitutions of target organizations, articles of incorporation, university rules and regulations, organizational registration and application forms from the IRS, posters, student newspaper articles, bank signature cards, agendas for demonstrations, petitions to Congress, and newspaper articles.

Congressional efforts to develop sanctions against political dissidents included putting pressure on the IRS to audit individuals and deny tax-exempt status to organizations, and attempts to cut off scholarships and other forms of federal aid to campus troublemakers. About a dozen major American universities were subpoenaed to provide the names of every student involved in campus disruptions.

The committees also concerned themselves with the funding of subversive groups and subpoenaed their bank records in an effort to intimidate contributors.

Federal Grand Jury Intelligence Activities

After numerous court suits, Congressional anti-subversive committees' legitimacy was discredited and their principal weapon, the public exposure device, was no longer effective. The new leftists could not be linked to the "Soviet Menace," and most importantly, they were in many cases supported by a broad middle-class anti-war consensus. A new means of attack was needed, one clothed with a more plausible justification than the Congressional committees' claimed legislative purpose. This led to the emergence of a new repressive offensive: the federal grand jury.

The grand jury has been traditionally, an arm of the court, charged only with judicial, not executive functions. Its mandate was primarily to evaluate and appraise evidence developed independently by the prosecutor to decide if he had presented sufficient evidence to justify an accusation of law violation for an indictment. It could not engage in a "fishing expedition" seeking information in a haphazard, unfocused way, nor could it be converted into a "prosecutive tool".

The White House enlarged these traditional functions of the grand jury into a cover for a variety of intelligence-related pursuits divorced from legal ends. The grand jury was assigned to the Internal Security Division (ISD) of the Department of Justice and the ISD's Special Litigation Section (SLS) was used to wield this new weapon against dissent. At the same time, the Inter-Departmental Intelligence Unit of the Department of Justice was converted from a riot-alert function to a fully ideologized political intelligence unit, with inputs from the entire intelligence community, and was also made part of the ISD. And finally, the ISD itself was enlarged as part of a master plan to deploy all available resources against the new dissenters. Thus a single branch of the Department of Justice was entrusted with the employment legal sanctions in counter-subversive/intelligence operations unrelated to law enforcement.

The framework for the entire program was the conspiracy concept. Concentrating on inchoate offenses enabled the ISD to cast its net as widely as possible without appearing to abandon a law enforcement objective and to use informers wherever available to carry out investigations. In turn, investigation overkill was assured by an assumption inherent in modern intelligence, that entire areas of protest (women's liberation, the Catholic left, anti-war protest) were linked in a highly reticulated network with a common end. This shared-end hypothesis was used to justify subpoenaing targets committed to the use of lawful means of achieving their goals.

The effectiveness of the grand jury proceeding as an intelligence instrument is directly traceable to the subpoena power it wields which compels testimony and the production of documents on pain of contempt. A dominant aim of such compel-led testimony has been to force a witness to name associates and friends in an ever widening inquisition. There are no limits to the number of individuals a federal grand jury prosecutor may choose to subpoena. A federal judge has observed: "the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury."

The secrecy of the grand jury proceeding cloaks abuses, and the possibility of a jail sentence for contempt so intimidate the witness that he may be led into answering questions that are frequently immaterial, prying into his personal life and political associations. The prosecutor can ask whatever questions he chooses and in whatever form suits his fancy since he is unrestrained by the evidentiary requirements of an adversary trial. The witness has little or no protection against an oppressive prosecutor and cannot even bring his counsel into the grand jury room. He has no right to learn the subject of the investigation, whether a question is material, or indeed whether he himself is a target of the inquiry.

From 1970 to 1974, the period of its hey-day, the grand jury became a police state instrument. Between 1,000 and 2,000 witnesses were subpoenaed in over 100 grand jury proceedings in 84 cities of 36 states. They produced a serious impact on many targets, including New Left radicals, anti-war intellectuals, the Catholic left, black militants, anti-draft movements, the women's movement, journalists, lawyers, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Out of an estimated 400 indictments returned by the ISD grand juries, the conviction and plea rate was less than 15 percent, compared to 65.2 percent in ordinary criminal cases, an eloquent commentary on the insubstantial character of the indictments.

Subsequent criticisms of the ISD focused only on the broad aspects of the politicized grand jury system. The full range of abuses included the use of legions of FBI agents armed with subpoenas who fanned out for harassing interviews with bewildered and frightened subjects, followed up by subpoena enforced appearances; the need to hire a lawyer; the pressure to betray and inform on others however innocent the association; the public trail for contempt if they failed to answer the prosecutor's questions; and the jail sentences where grounds for refusal to answer were rejected.

These abuses have, in the post-Watergate era, catalyzed a broader movement for the reform of the grand jury system. A wide range of organizations, from the National Council of Churches to the American Bar Association, have urged a variety of reform process rights before grand juries, including the right to advance notice of a hearing, the availability of an attorney at the hearing, notification to witnesses of their rights, a ban on use of the grand jury process to gather evidence in support of a pending indictment, the abolition of forced immunity, the freeing of grand juries from prosecutorial controls by authorizing the retention of independent counsel, and a prohibition on the jailing of a witness twice for refusal to answer the same questions. But today the grand jury is still an intelligence option, especially in the political sphere; an investigative tool used by police agents when appropriate detection procedures have failed.

Private Sector Counter-subversive Intelligence Activities

A pattern of support and collaboration between government and private intelligence forces dominates the history of radical hunting in this country. Beginning in 1918, the transplanting to the U.S. of revolutionary ideologies and the need to contain the growing labor force presented problems to American capitalism. Private intelligence forces emerged to combat radicalism, labor unionism and opposition to the war. Government agents on all levels worked with corporate officials, labor spies, super-patriots, amateur detectives and assorted vigilantes in infiltration, provocation, raids, and the dissemination of propaganda.

To fill the need for a professional-style response to movements for change, private agencies (independent bodies of investigators for hire) emerged equipped with techniques of surveillance, impersonation, deception, infiltration and dossier keeping. In many instances, detectives were recruited for surveillance and espionage by particular industries ("Coal and Iron Police," "Railroad police," etc.). Cooperative arrangements were also made with local police officials, particularly in the labor field.

Counter-subversive methods of the fifties and sixties included the use of "exposes" to discredit the target and to injure him or her personally by generating community and employment sanctions. These were most often published in special newsletters and leaflets.

The two most important non-governmental counter-subversive establishments today are the Church League of America (CLA) and the American Security Council (ASC). The CLA is headed by Edgar Bundy, former Air Force intelligence officer and ordained Baptist minister. The CLA's counter-subversive file collection contains over 7 million index cards and is claimed to be "the most reliable, comprehensive and complete, second only to those of the FBI." It also includes 100 tons of computerized files and a huge library. The holdings list "every name of every person, organization, movement, publication or subject of significance..." in the counter-subversive intelligence field. The CLA also works with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The CLA's subsidiary, the National Laymen's Digest, provides "documented exposes" to contributors and subscribers, and for an additional fee "name checks" based on "documented information." All contributions to CLA, are tax-deductible as charitable donations. To "American businessmen faced with the grave problem" of troublemakers and radicals in the work force, CLA offers a special service: name checks of suspected employees and applicants for employment.

In addition to hiring detective agencies, the CLA has its own network of undercover agents, who infiltrate, make tape recordings, take photographs and steal mailing lists. To tap the most generous source of funding, large corporations, it allied itself in 1969 with a newly formed investigative unit, National Goals, Inc., but it still ranks only second in that most lucrative intelligence field. The employer counter-subversive market is dominated by the ASC. It also has the closest ties with established power centers (especially Congress) of all the components of the private intelligence community, and is a tireless lobbyist for congressional investigations. Organized in Chicago in 1955 by ex-FBI agents as the MidWest Library, it was sponsored and funded by corporations and conceived as a reference source from which employer members could obtain information about the politics of employees or applicants for employment, as well as reports on "questionable" organizations." Today it has over 3,200 corporate members, led by industrial giants who pay dues based on the size of their work force. Its file archives, in excess of 6,400,000 entries, are based on Harry Jung's American Vigilant Intelligence Foundation collection, augmented by the acquisition and consolidation of six other file systems, and kept up to date by informer reports, government documents, leftist publications, and clippings from a huge array of newspapers and magazines.

Other employer-financed data collection operations organized by ex-FBI or military intelligence personnel in the 1950s: Western Research Foundation, the American Library of Information, and the San Diego Research Library.