COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on American Activists (1956-1971)

ARCHIVE FILE · Event years: 1956-1971 (exposed 1971). This is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

Plenty of conspiracy theories start with “the FBI is secretly watching activists.” This one ends with a stack of stolen FBI paperwork proving it, followed by a U.S. Senate committee confirming it in print.

CASE FILE · RW-ARC-HIS-004
Subject: COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program)
Run by: Federal Bureau of Investigation
Director: J. Edgar Hoover
Dates: 1956 to 1971
Exposed by: The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI (break-in, 8 March 1971)
Confirmed by: Senate Church Committee, 1976
Status: Confirmed by the FBI’s own files
Filing system: Unexpectedly portable

What it was

COINTELPRO was a series of covert, often illegal, FBI projects aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting American political organizations. It began in 1956 against the Communist Party USA and widened over the next fifteen years.

The targets read like a history syllabus: the Communist Party, anti-war organizers, feminist groups, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the American Indian Movement, Chicano groups, and civil rights and Black power leaders and organizations, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States’ Rights Party were targeted too.

Hoover’s own instructions spelled out the goal: to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the groups and their leaders. Assistant Director William C. Sullivan was the official in charge. According to the historical record, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the operations.

The break-in

On the night of 8 March 1971, while much of the country was watching the first Ali-Frazier fight, a small group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI’s field office in Media, Pennsylvania. They took files and mailed them to newspapers. (Muhammad Ali himself had been a target of FBI surveillance.)

One document carried the routing word “COINTELPRO.” NBC reporter Carl Stern then sued under the Freedom of Information Act to learn what it meant. The FBI said it officially ended the program in April 1971. Later investigations found that surveillance and disruption continued anyway: from 1972 to 1974 there were more than 500 warrantless wiretaps and over 2,000 letters opened.

The King letter

The best-known single item is a package the FBI mailed to Martin Luther King Jr. on 21 November 1964. It contained recordings and an anonymous letter, written as if by a disillusioned supporter, that historians widely read as urging King to kill himself. Taylor Branch, among others, has documented it, and the Church Committee investigated it.

The Panthers

The FBI treated the Black Panther Party as a top target. Its informant-driven operations in Chicago fed into the 4 December 1969 police raid that killed Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. That raid has been litigated and investigated for decades. How far the FBI’s involvement reached remains documented in part and disputed in its details.

The Church Committee

In 1975-76, the Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Sen. Frank Church, investigated COINTELPRO along with CIA abuses. Its final report (1976) concluded that many of the techniques “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” and that COINTELPRO went far beyond that.

Footage

We’re not embedding video for this case. There’s no official footage of the program itself, and we haven’t verified a public-domain upload of the hearings yet. The featured image is a National Archives portrait of Hoover. (Description method: Wikimedia Commons file metadata; facts from the FBI Vault, the Church Committee final report and Wikipedia’s sourced article, no footage viewed.)

Grades