COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert campaigns against American political groups

The Senate Select Committee's staff report says the first official counterintelligence program, aimed at the Communist Party, USA, began in August 1956 with FBI Director Hoover's approval. It was the first of five programs that ran until 1971.

An FBI directive sent to seventeen field offices set up a program to 'expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize' Klan-type and hate organizations. This widened the covert action tactics beyond the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party programs.

FBI headquarters sent a letter to twenty-three field offices ordering them to 'expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize' black nationalist organizations. The Senate report notes that the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was among the groups the program labeled as targets.

The FBI resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, was broken into and files were stolen. The Senate report says the stolen documents were widely circulated and published by the press. Some carried a 'COINTELPRO' caption, a word unknown outside the Bureau until then.

After the Media documents were published, the Bureau ended the programs. An internal memorandum is dated April 27, 1971, and a letter from FBI headquarters to all field offices followed on April 28, 1971. The Senate committee later found that the termination order still allowed counterintelligence action case by case, and that at least three COINTELPRO-type actions happened afterwards.

In a Freedom of Information Act suit by broadcast journalist Carl Stern against the Attorney General, Judge Parker of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia inspected the requested 'Cointelpro-New Left' documents in camera. The court found that they fell outside the claimed exemptions and entered summary judgment for the plaintiff, ordering their disclosure.

At a press conference in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, Attorney General William B. Saxbe answered questions about the legality, ending and actions of COINTELPRO and about the release of the department's report, which drew on Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen's review. Saxbe agreed that many activities were legitimate but said a listed set of actions were ones the department did not consider proper. He said Petersen's review found no prosecutable offenses.

The Senate approved, 82 to 4, a resolution creating a select committee to study government intelligence activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church. Its staff went on to examine COINTELPRO.

In Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General, Judge Griesa of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the FBI's disruption operations, surreptitious entries and use of informants violated the party's constitutional rights. The court awarded the party $264,000 in damages against the United States.