In the Name of Security, What Liberties Are We Willing to Lose? FBI v. The People - The COINTELPRO Files

On the night of the “Fight of the Century”, a nation built upon pillars of democracy watched as the people’s pinnacle of defense and symbol of security was unveiled as its apex predator. On March 8th, 1971, while millions of Americans watched Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier trading blows in Madison Square Garden, an unbecoming, far worse showdown unfolded. A group of activists - the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI - broke into an office in Media, Pennsylvania, and, as was documented, stole around 1,000 highly classified documents (If We Knew Our History, 2025). 

One single heist that triggered a catastrophic shift within America, where in an instant, FBI Director John Edgar Hoover and his carefully articulated myths surrounding his men and their heroic battle against gangs and terror, were obliterated. Revealing the underlying identity, of a political machine centered around espionage targeting civilians and groups (‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records Acquired by the Library Reveal Violent Surveillance of Black Leaders, Civil Rights Organizations, n.d.). 

The stolen files exposed the Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO - an illegal operation by Director Hoover, masterminded and carried out as of 1956 (Foster, 2014). Having originally existed as a measure against Soviet spies and intelligence, it quickly metastasized into a means of exercising “preventive neutralization”, to halt the ‘threat’ of political groups. This, moreover, was categorized by the Senate’s Church Committee Board as non-routine, unnatural usage of law enforcement, that can be described as savage and a ‘war’ waged against the citizens of America, designed to choke nonconformist and rebel political ideas before they could be manifested into actions (Foster, 2014).

For an estimated 15 years, the Bureau of Investigation was using wiretaps, fabricated evidence, and even anonymous threats to terrorize their targets into submission, making them stand as an executioner of free speech; within which anti war student groups all the way to civil rights activist giants like Martin Luther King Jr suffered aggressive harassment and pressure into suicide. And that was not even its peak, as eventually the program moved to deadly, state sponsored factionalism and violence, targeting BLM parties, such as the Black Panther Party which bore 223 out of 295 documented Black Nationalist counterintelligence procedures, including the 1969  assassination of their leader Fred Hampton (Olsen, 2020) .

Thus, with the bloody mechanics of this breach of rights and the programs existence as a threat to one’s self expression and freedom of speech, a horrified public reacted with outrage, shattering decades of trust in federal government and enforcing historic consequences and accountability via investigations. With this, ultimately, COINTELPRO is classified as an intensively organized bureaucratic system that turned the legal system into a weapon, and waged psychological war against civilians and illegal surveillance to enforce ideological conformity - the exact narratives today’s democracies use to demonize their enemies  (‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records Acquired by the Library Reveal Violent Surveillance of Black Leaders, Civil Rights Organizations, n.d.). 

The Genesis of Hooverism 

COINTELPRO was built on the foundational idea of systemwide state-funded and sponsored paranoia, formally launched on August 28th, 1956, under the framing of a defensive Cold War measure to counter Soviet espionage and spies, under the name ‘COINTELPRO-Communist Party, USA’. However, it rapidly moved and evolved, with its parameters expanding with the 1960s political landscape to go far beyond foreign spies, and coming back to target home - turning towards domestic rights activists, anti-war groups, and student movements. This unchecked expansion was fueled by the absolute bureaucratic autonomy and a lack of well divided power placed in the hands of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Gordon, 2026). He proceeded to engineer an environment that prioritized conformity and secrecy over the boundaries outlined in the Constitution itself, utilizing a ‘Do Not File’ procedure to shield the illicit operations from administrations, generals, and congressional oversight through the record management systems. Herein, the protocol followed agents who delivered and circulated illegal and highly sensitive counterintelligence memos on paper, and intentionally left them out of the searchable, official files of the FBI - thereby erasing the trail of state overreach and abuse of power (Gordon, 2026). 

In this, spying on American citizens was justified as a preemptive measure enacted against even those who committed no crimes to ensure ‘security’. This exploited existing legal pretexts, including the Smith Act of 1940 which criminalized working or advocating to overthrow the government. Additionally, Hoovers powers extended to twisting the executive orders given in the Cold War era to push his agenda, where measures designed to ensure federal employee loyalty where used as a pass to allow domestic surveillance (“Office of the Deputy Attorney General - United States (Title 17, United States Code),” 1974)(Frédérique & Britannica Editors, 2026). The Church Committee investigations that were later carried out revealed that this was further exacerbated and supported within FBI headquarters through strict quota systems that demand local agents to routinely report and express new innovative and aggressive ideas for free speech disruption(“Office of the Deputy Attorney General - United States (Title 17, United States Code),” 1974). Here, agents promotions and salaries increased in direct tie to the effectiveness of their ideas when it came to neutralizing political targets, thus, creating incentive to deploy radical, immoral tactics against everyday citizens under the guise of a form of public protection (Frédérique & Britannica Editors, 2026).

Mapping the Targets 

Moving towards understanding the full scope of COINTELPRO, it’s necessary to examine the specific targeting and categorization of domestic political groups and beliefs, where instead of functioning as a policy based program, the FBI used and delved into creating specialized programs tailored to specific ideologies. Here, pivotal examples are shown: 

COINTELPRO BLACK NATIONALIST HATE GROUPS (Launched in 1967). 

As detailed in the Senate’s 1967 Church Committee Report, the chief directive of this initiative was to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify … the militant black nationalist movement”(Foster, 2014). This very directive led to an aggressive and deep targeting of Civil Rights Activist, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Mdingi, 2022). Every move which King conducted was monitored, with wiretaps, records of his private life, and even anonymous mails of suicide letters and audio tapes, aiming to emotionally wreck him before his public campaigns could expand  (Mdingi, 2022). This can be seen as an effort to deny the black movement from gaining traction by breaking key figures and ‘messiahs’ who seemed to gain public support (Foster, 2014). Simultaneously, the program of COINTELPRO aimed to decimate the Black Panther Party, where in Chicago, agents heavily targeted their chairman, Fred Hampton. A man whose ability to build multi race coalitions such as the Rainbow Coalition, his power to bring people together marked him as a primary target (Mdingi, 2022). Here, paid informant William O’Neal was utilized and hired by the Bureau to slip a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment to authorities. This very action enabled a raid on December 4, 1969, where police fired nearly 100 rounds into the apartment, successfully executing the chairman in his bed (Mdingi, 2022)(Foster, 2014).

COINTELPRO - New Left (1968) 

In May 1968, the Bureau expanded their net by launching the New Left division or program. The operational aggressively monitored organizations, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), anti-war groups and coalitions, and even early feminist movements (Stieva, 2018). The idea was to map out and target groups with ‘leftist’ ideas that challenged the politics of conformity existing today. This was driven by a deep institutional paranoia regarding a counterculture that weakens present ideologies, as the FBI viewed, for example, anti-Vietnam War student activism as an existential threat to national stability, and not as protected democratic speech and movement (Stieva, 2018), unlike the rights in the Constitution’s First Amendment. In this aspect, the goal of destroying these groups pushed agents to print fake, highly derogatory campus newspapers that leaked false and fabricated tales to local media that would get student organizers of these groups expelled. Here, they’d coordinate with university administration to terminate the employment of politically active professors and successfully paralyzing student activism across major universities in the country (Stieva, 2018). 

COINTELPRO - White Hate Groups (1964) 

Comparing left-wing targets to COINTELPRO’s White Hate Groups section, deep systemic insight is brought to light. Initiated in 1964 to monitor organizations such as the KKK - the Ku Klux Klan - and the Minutemen, who targeted black individuals, a stark double standards can be found in the handling of these factions (Stieva & University of Calgary, 2018). White supremist groups, as per Churchill’s The COINTELPRO Papers, were viewed as criminal actors but not as threats to the state, with the focus in their targeting lying in uncovering and containing law breaking violence (Foster, 2014). Meanwhile, when examining black nationalist and leftist groups, FBI operations were explicitly designed to obliterate them due to their core political ideas, coming to dismantle their community infrastructure and wrecking their credibility and ideological reach (Foster, 2014) (Stieva & University of Calgary, 2018). Here, the unlawful violence against these individuals was permitted and actively tolerated by the FBI when it came to helping destroy left wing political ideas and using undercover informants to provoke aggression and internal fractures within groups (Foster, 2014). 

The Socialist Workers Party Disruption Program  

The COINTELPRO Files were deeply entrenched and dedicated towards punishing ideological nonconformity, a commitment that is further emphasized by the SWP Disruption Program (Foster, 2014). For 15 years, the FBI maintained and continued to harass the SWP, despite its existence as a legal and non violent political party, participating in American electoral politics (Foster, 2014). These mechanisms of battling the ideology extended to agents breaking into party offices to steal membership lists, contacting employers of SWP candidates to get them fired, and even spreading rumors that candidates were engaged in illegal sexual and assault based actions. Moreover, the result of this pressure was the paralysis of the party’s electoral efforts, making the operation prove with irrefutable evidence that COINTELPRO was not merely tracking criminal behavior, but rather a system used as a weapon of the state to suppress legitimate and constitutional electoral dissent and political participation (Foster, 2014). 

The Tactful Mechanisms of State Disruption

Being the weapon of psychological warfare and the systemic threat to constitutional principles promised to the American people that it was, the COINTELPRO’s targets were subjected to tactics that did not merely monitor disagreement with political expectations, but also engineered its obliteration (Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 - December 4, 1969), 2020). This scheme was conducted through what can be compared to a menu of varied means used to weaken and render groups vulnerable. Thus, shattering legal organizations without ever filing formal criminal charges and pushed state disruption (Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 - December 4, 1969), 2020). 

Grey Propaganda and Poison Pen Operations 

Grey propaganda - which is the falsification of information that has no clear or properly identifiable source, an uncertain level of truthfulness to it, and even a hidden sponsor - was utilized and relied on to weaponize identity. Here, letters, flyers, newspapers, publications, media articles, and even local outlets were used to and intentionally designed to dissolve marriages, sever political alliances, and vaporize personal credibility(Bouman, 2013). Thereby proving the FBI program’s reach into personal privacy and everyday life, and manipulation of classified information to push their agendas and influence the politics of the decade (Bouman, 2013). Here, the most infamous weapon of this category, or the most notable example, would be the 1964 FBI-King Suicide Letter (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.). Orchestrated by William C Sullivan, the Bureau of Investigation’s Head of Domestic Intelligence, FBI Headquarters mailed an anonymous package to Coretta Scott King, MLK’s wife, containing audio surveillance tapes of her husband’s personal life (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.). Accompanying this, was a chilling, fabricated letter written from the supposed perspective of an aggrieved black activist, declaring that King was a “filthy, abnormal beast”, and threatening him with public exposure of his private everyday hidden activities and matters, and even going so far as to conclude with the warning: “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.).  

Snitch-Jacking (Bad Jacking) 

When the aforementioned psychological intimidation failed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned to “snitch jacking” - a tactic used in psychological warfare to falsely brand legitimate and high ranking activists and characters as federal informants, so they’d falsely frame someone as a government informant or agent of law enforcement to stain their credibility and alienate them from the group they represent (Messinger, 2026). Truly, this seemingly and deceptively simple mechanic was devastatingly effective. Agents would plant forged government payment receipts in the victims’ or targets’ workplace, and drop marked money into random areas like glove boxes of activists’ cars, or even intentionally arrange for a prominent leader to be arrested then instantly released while their peers remained in jail as if they were bailed out due to their secret links with the government and role as ‘snitches’ (Messinger, 2026). This engineered illusion triggered infectious animosity, creating paranoia within dissident groups and political movements, leading to routine mass expulsions of innocent members, and bitter inner conflicts, which in extreme cases would even result in internal executions. This was specifically utilized by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI against the BPP (Messinger, 2026). 

State-Sponsored Factionalism 

Instead of directly dismantling movements, the FBI frequently proceeded to favor manipulating external rivalries between groups, as a means of tricking the political movements or organizations into destroying one another. This strategy reached its peak in Southern California, wherein the Bureau abused an ideological feud that existed between the BPP and the US Organization -  a cultural nationalist group led by Maulana Karenga (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.-a). Within this effort, field offices created a proxy war - or armed conflict between external third party powers that uses state or non state groups instead to fight - by mailing anonymous and forged death threats and creating derogatory and insulting drawings and political cartoons, mocking the BPP and falsely signing the works as members of the US Organization to create conflict (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.-a). Furthermore, this calculated strategy ignited deadly waves of gang warfare, specifically in Los Angeles, where public assassinations marred the news, such as those of high ranking leaders of the BPP, John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, on the UCLA campus (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.-a). This action was deemed a triumph for counterintelligence, and celebrated through the internal FBI memos that don’t go in the record. 

Judicial Sabotage and Local Police Collisions 

The final example of a layer of subversion relied on the weaponization of the legal system within itself through creating collusion amongst local police (Bouman, 2013). FBI used local police forces and officers to orchestrate and carry out arbitrary raids, plant narcotics, drugs, and illegal weapons in certain areas, and ensure intentionally extreme bail demands that are designed to drain the funds of activists that are dedicated towards legal defense as a means of pushing them into bankruptcy (Frédérique & Britannica Editors, 2026). All of this was coordinated though funding and communication channels with the mentioned local forces, such as LEAA, or the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (Bouman, 2013). Moreover, it’s necessary to note this unconstitutional, as the 8th amendment of the US Constitution protects against excessive bail, which is further applied to state courts as well by the 14th amendment. This toxic alliance between the FBI and the police culminated in the December 4, 1969 assassination of BPP leader Fred Hampton, where as was mentioned previously, an undercover informant - William O’Neal - who posed as a high ranking BPP security chief supplied his handling agent, Roy Mitchell, with a precise and hand drawn architecturally accurate floor plan of Hamptons apartment in Chicago, including the location of the bed being explicitly marked (Frédérique & Britannica Editors, 2026). This very blueprint was handed to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s police raid team, who used the map and a drugged Hampton thanks to O’Neal, to seize their chance and flood the darkened apartment, firing said 100 rounds into the walls, and executing the 21 year old in cold blood while his reportedly pregnant fiancée slept beside him (Frédérique & Britannica Editors, 2026).

The Cascade of Exposure 

With this, in a full circle moment, the undoer and reverser of the COINTELPRO’s shroud of secrecy was the channel Hoover least anticipated: the American press (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) | Bureau of Justice Assistance, n.d.). Following the events of March 8th, 1971, and the burglary conducted by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, the group sent photocopies of the classified documents to news outlets and local media sources, in order to publicize the groundbreaking information to the nation, with the intent belief that this information would expose the truth that the people had the right to know (United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs & Paul, 2023). Herein, most newsrooms who’d received photocopies from the batches of stolen files were wary of this program that was cloaked in mystery and suspicions, returning the copies they’d received to the Bureau itself (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) | Bureau of Justice Assistance, n.d.). This was until Betty Medsger and a reporter at the Washington Post decided otherwise - wherein Medsger received an unusual set of around a dozen photocopied document shortly after joining the team of staff. Here, colleagues aided in ensuring the authenticity with the FBI prior to proceeding with protecting her source rather than offering it to the respective authorities. Moreover, as she later detailed in her 2014 publication “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI”, the break in initiated a chain of events that ultimately led to exposing Hoover’s campaign to suppress dissent, thus, tarnishing the Bureau’s public image and eroding the people’s trust in authority. Therefore, congressional hearings were put to place, reforming intelligence agencies while the publications that proceeded following this and worked in defiance of the Nixon Justice Department’s demands for the files’ return marked a fracture in the loyalty of the press to the Bureau, and further exacerbated the exposure cascade, and aided in its motion (United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs & Paul, 2023)(The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) | Bureau of Justice Assistance, n.d.). 

This event directly forced the historic congressional intervention which became or created a specialized committee within Congress: the Church Committee (1975-1976), which formally operated as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Court of Review, 1978-present | Federal Judicial Center, n.d.). Here, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the committee undertook what is regarded in history as one of the most exhaustive and significant oversight investigations in American history, reviewing around 110,000 documents and interviewing approximately 800 witnesses before publishing a final report that spanned 2,702 pages (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Court of Review, 1978-present | Federal Judicial Center, n.d.). Within this, findings confirmed and supplied the public with what they had long suspected yet never confirmed due to the lack of official words from the government. The committee documented, moreover, that COINTELPRO had operated for years in this manner prior to its official 1956 initiation, constantly growing more and more extensive than the files which the Citizens’ Commission had initially released. They uncovered the targeting of speakers, teachers, writers, and even peaceful demonstrators rather than focusing on keeping the streets safe as they target genuine criminal activity in a substantial share of their documented actions (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Court of Review, 1978-present | Federal Judicial Center, n.d.). And so, it is regarded as conduct that fundamentally disrespected the rights and sovereignty of the people and was unworthy. 

This pushed for calls for reform and preventative measures that aim to mitigate the recurrence of unchecked executive surveillance, wherein Congress erected permanent structural firewalls in the Church Committee’s wake…. Here, Permanent House and Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees were established as a means of maintaining continuous budgetary and operational review of intelligence agencies to maintain balance in the division of power and to avoid abuse of power (Frank Church and the Church Committee - Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, 2024). Congress also passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which requires for the Department of Justice to apply to said court to obtain a warrant prior to conducting electronic surveillance of a foreign power or its agent within the United States (Frank Church and the Church Committee - Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, 2024). Thereby making the legislation a direct response to the Church Committee’s findings on executive branch abuses of domestic electronic surveillance. And so, the Levi Guidelines were issued - as per Attorney General Edward Levi - to formally bar the FBI from opening domestic security investigations when a hefty or demonstrable amount of criminal conduct can be reported, thus ending the loophole of preventative neutralization - the very idea or philosophy that culminated and made way for the birth of the COINTELPRO files in the first place (Frank Church and the Church Committee - Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, 2024). 

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COINTELPRO was never truly buried behind, it never truly died; only merely rebranded. Its official termination in 1971 did not end the underlying doctrine beneath it, or the ideology that pushed it. The idea that dissent could be treated as a security threat rather than protected speech drove the doctrine once, now hiding underground, but it will wait for the next crisis to justify its return. That crisis arrived on September 11th of 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act resurrected the FBI’s Hoover era authority and watchfulness, as they’d investigate Americans on the thinnest of terms, loosening the very restrictions which the Levi Guidelines had imposed to ensure justice for the earlier generation (Frank Church and the Church Committee - Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, 2024). In this, NSA’s PRISM program, which had been exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013 probes that mass and warrantless objection of citizens communication had survived the Church Committee in its spirit if not its same, as can be inferred from the mechanism and tactics of the modern world(Frank Church and the Church Committee - Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, 2024). In 2017, the FBI’s Black Identity Extremist emerged as a most direct descendant, circulating by the Bureau’s counterterrorism unit which would exist across and during Black Liver Matter protests and warned of police brutality against civilians of African American descent (Farmer, n.d.). These modern revelations are echoes of an old concept and the classifications match those which the FBI once used against Black radical movements, promoting immediate comparisons to its predecessor, the COINTELPRO (Farmer, n.d.). 

Over time, documents revealed and confirmed that the Bureau had used confidential informants and physical surveillance to track individuals connected to the target groups and movements. 

What COINTELPRO does or serves to do is ultimately provide a warning that outlives every generation, thus, we are left with a reminder that national security that is designed to be left unaccountable does not remain open and honest. It drifts inwards and it comes to see the citizen exercising a constitutional right as indistinguishable from the enemy at the gate. Oversight is not a bureaucratic formality or requirement that tops democracy, rather, it is the only mechanism that keeps the states powers safe and protected from becoming a part of the power that nations use to punish dissent. 

The FBI was built to protect the Constitution from its enemies, and in this, it went against every aspect of it. COINTELPRO revealed what happens when authority decides that the civilians are the enemy. In this context, the idea of a government that fears its own people will always exist, and those in power will always to some extent deem freedom to be a threat. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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