COINTELPRO: The Untold Amercian Story

This document printed at 28pp but very important to read and understand
what has and is going on with covert US intel agency corruptions of
"American Justice" and especially the overview of the FBI misconduct
in the Leonard Peltier case which is at the root of why they are so against
the truth coming to light on this matter and oppose executive clemency
for Peltier which would bring this truth out to the public assumedly.

This is from Barry Bachrach, attorney for Leonard Peltier. Please pass it
on to people on your personal lists and ask them to do the same. In these
days of renewed fbi show trials like the shameless travesty just foisted
on american 'justice' in rapid city, this becomes urgent reading for all
of us. If anyone not already a part of lpnet wishes to become part of
this growing network--personally pitching in to help us distribute
messages like this worldwide--please send a message with the words
"yes, i'll join lpnet" on the subject line to
HARVEY [at] HAVEYOUTHOUGHT.COM

This is from Barry Bachrach, attorney for Leonard Peltier. Please pass it
on to people on your personal lists and ask them to do the same. In these
days of renewed fbi show trials like the shameless travesty just foisted
on american 'justice' in rapid city, this becomes urgent reading for all
of us. If anyone not already a part of lpnet wishes to become part of
this growing network--personally pitching in to help us distribute
messages like this worldwide--please send a message with the words
"yes, i'll join lpnet" on the subject line to
HARVEY [at] HAVEYOUTHOUGHT.COM

WE WILL GET LEONARD OUT!! BLESSINGS, /Harvey Arden

**************************************************************************
And PLEASE pre-order TODAY your copy of the soon-to-be-published
~HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?~
Order at http://WWW.HAVEYOUTHOUGHT.COM
**************************************************************************
__________________________________________________________________

russ has been doing some excellent work putting together articles on many
relevant subjects. this one is on cointelpro. it is still very timely
because the program has never stopped. i strongly suggest we put this on
lists and circulate as broadly as possible. it is importantant we remember
the past so we don't fall into the same problems in the present. thanks,
b.
-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Redner

Barry,

This is a must to re-educate our people again--we have all forgot and the
FBI and US Justice departments are doing the same you can believe that--we
must disseminate this Untold article and build a speaking campaign around
it--hold panels and tie in US Pat Act, Homeland Defense andthe Old War
Depart. and LP's detainment and todays detainees in Gitmo and have you
heard of the Puerto Rican Obituary's its a poem by Pedro Piete? Get it
and read it good stuff...

Below are extensive reports on Commission that went to Durban, SA in 2001.
Some of the names are worth reading that made this report and all get
back to me as soon as you can
Enjoy...


COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story

Compilation by Paul Wolf with contributions from Robert Boyle, Bob Brown,
Tom Burghardt, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Kathleen Cleaver, Bruce
Ellison, Cynthia McKinney, Nkechi Taifa, Laura Whitehorn, Nicholas Wilson,
and Howard Zinn.

Presented to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson at the
World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa by the members of
the Congressional Black Caucus attending the conference: Donna
Christianson, John Conyers, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Barbara Lee, Sheila
Jackson Lee, Cynthia McKinney, and Diane Watson, September 1, 2001.


Table of Contents

Overview

Victimization

COINTELPRO Techniques

Murder and Assassination

Agents Provocateurs

The Ku Klux Klan

The Secret Army Organization

Snitch Jacketing

The Subversion of the Press

Political Prisoners

Leonard Peltier

Mumia Abu Jamal

Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Marshall Eddie Conway

Justice Hangs in the Balance

Appendix: The Legacy of COINTELPRO

CISPES

The Judi Bari Bombing

Bibliography


AIM PAPERS

Overview

We're here to talk about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have
this peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country - everybody
knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our ears a
thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute the flag,
you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you read the
history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of democracy. And, of
course, there's some truth to that. There are things you can do in the
United States that you can't do many other places without being put in
jail.

But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to describe
because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are things that
you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death squads in El
Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the
things that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits
like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and the
existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates
the spirit of democracy.

Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation's premier crime
fighting agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always functioned
primarily as America's political police. This role includes not only the
collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and
groups, but often times, counterintelligence operations to thwart those
activities. The techniques employed are easily recognized by anyone
familiar with military psychological operations. The FBI, through the use
of the criminal justice system, the postal system, the telephone system
and the Internal Revenue Service, enjoys an operational capability
surpassing even that of the CIA, which conducts covert actions in foreign
countries without having access to those institutions.

Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the
formal COunter INTELligence PROgrams (COINTELPRO's) of the period
1956-1971 were the first to be both broadly targeted and centrally
directed. According to FBI researcher Brian Glick, "FBI headquarters set
policy, assessed progress, charted new directions, demanded increased
production, and carefully monitored and controlled day-to-day operations.
This arrangement required that national COINTELPRO supervisors and local
FBI field offices communicate back and forth, at great length, concerning
every operation. They did so quite freely, with little fear of public
exposure. This generated a prolific trail of bureaucratic paper. The
moment that paper trail began to surface, the FBI discontinued all of its
formal domestic counterintelligence programs. It did not, however, cease
its covert political activity against U.S. dissidents." 1

Of roughly 20,000 people investigated by the FBI solely on the basis of
their political views between 1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets
of active counterintelligence measures per se. Taking counterintelligence
in its broadest sense, to include spreading false information, it's
estimated that about two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were
never suspected of committing any crime.

The nineteen sixties were a period of social change and unrest. Color
television brought home images of jungle combat in Vietnam and protesters
and priests burning draft cards and American flags. In the spring and
summer months of 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968, massive black rebellions
swept across almost every major US city in the Northeast, Midwest and
California. 2 Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and many others feared violent
revolution and denounced the protesters. President Kennedy had felt the
opposite: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable."

The counterculture of the sixties, and the FBI's reaction to it, were in
many ways a product of the 1950s, the so-called "Age of McCarthyism." John
Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the FBI, was a prominent spokesman of
the anti-communist paranoia of the era:

The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not
always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and
secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of
life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged
movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their
sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify,
the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of
Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to
know the enemies of the American way of life. 3

Throughout the 1960s, Hoover consistently applied this theory to a wide
variety of groups, on occasion reprimanding agents unable to find
"obvious" communist connections in civil rights and anti-war groups. 4
During the entire COINTELPRO period, no links to Soviet Russia were
uncovered in any of the social movements disrupted by the FBI.

The commitment of the FBI to undermine and destroy popular movements
departing from political orthodoxy has been extensive, and apparently
proportional to the strength and promise of such movements, as one would
expect in the case of the secret police organization of any state, though
it is doubtful that there is anything comparable to this record among the
Western industrial democracies.

In retrospect, the COINTEPRO's of the 1960s were thoroughly successful in
achieving their stated goals, "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit,
or otherwise neutralize" the enemies of the State.


Victimization

The most serious of the FBI disruption programs were those directed
against "Black Nationalists." Agents were instructed to undertake actions
to discredit these groups both within "the responsible Negro community"
and to "Negro radicals," also "to the white community, both the
responsible community and to `liberals' who have vestiges of sympathy for
militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes..."

A March 4th, 1968 memo from J Edgar Hoover to FBI field offices laid out
the goals of the COINTELPRO - Black Nationalist Hate Groups program: "to
prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups;" "to prevent
the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black
nationalist movement;" "to prevent violence on the part of black
nationalist groups;" "to prevent militant black nationalist groups and
leaders from gaining respectability;" and "to prevent the long-range
growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among
youth." Included in the program were a broad spectrum of civil rights and
religious groups; targets included Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely
Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Elijah Muhammad.

A top secret Special Report 5 for President Nixon, dated June 1970 gives
some insight into the motivation for the actions undertaken by the
government to destroy the Black Panther party. The report describes the
party as "the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the
United States." Its "hard-core members" were estimated at about 800, but
"a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 per cent of the black
population has a great respect for the BPP, incuding 43 per cent of blacks
under 21 years of age." On the basis of such estimates of the potential of
the party, counterintelligence operations were carried out to ensure that
it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political
force.

Another memorandum explains the motivation for the FBI operations against
student protesters: "the movement of rebellious youth known as the 'New
Left,' involving and influencing a substantial number of college students,
is having a serious impact on contemporary society with a potential for
serious domestic strife." The New Left has "revolutionary aims" and an
"identification with Marxism-Leninism." It has attempted "to infiltrate
and radicalize labor," and after failing "to subvert and control the mass
media" has established "a large network of underground publications which
serve the dual purpose of an internal communication network and an
external propaganda organ." Its leaders have "openly stated their sympathy
with the international communist revolutionary movements in South Vietnam
and Cuba; and have directed others into activities which support these
movements."

The effectiveness of the state disruption programs is not easy to
evaluate. Black leaders estimate the significance of the programs as
substantial. Dr. James Turner of Cornell University, former president of
the African Heritage Studies Association, assessed these programs as
having "serious long-term consequences for black Americans," in that they
"had created in blacks a sense of depression and hopelessness." 6

He states that "the F.B.I. set out to break the momentum developed in
black communities in the late fifties and early sixties"; "we needed to
put together organizational mechanisms to deliver services," but instead,
"our ability to influence things that happen to us internally and
externally was killed." He concludes that "the lack of confidence and
paranoia stimulated among black people by these actions" is just beginning
to fade.

The American Indian Movement, arguably the most hopeful vehicle for
indigenous pride and self-determination in the late 20th century, was also
destroyed. As AIM leader Dennis Banks has observed:

"The FBI's tactics eventually proved successful in a peculiar sort of way.
It's remarkable under the circumstances - and a real testament to the
inner strength of the traditional Oglalas - that the feds were never
really able to divide them from us, to have the traditionals denouncing us
and working against us. But, in the end, the sort of pressure the FBI put
on people on the reservation, particularly the old people, it just wore
'em down. A kind of fatigue set in. With the firefight at Oglala, and all
the things that happened after that, it was easy to see we weren't going
to win by direct confrontation. So the traditionals asked us to disengage,
to try and take some of the heaviest pressure off. And, out of respect, we
had no choice but to honor those wishes. And that was the end of AIM, at
least in the way it had been known up till then. The resistance is still
there, of course, and the struggle goes on, but the movement itself kind
of disappeared." 7

The same can be said for socialist movements targeted by COINTELPRO. Alone
among the parliamentary democracies, the United States has no mass-based
socialist party, however mild and reformist, no socialist voice in the
media, and virtually no departure from Keynesian economics in American
universities and journals. The people of the United States have paid
dearly for the enforcement of domestic privilege and the securing of
imperial domains. The vast waste of social wealth, miserable urban
ghettos, the threat and reality of unemployment, meaningless work in
authoritarian institutions, standards of health and social welfare that
should be intolerable in a society with such vast productive resources --
all of this must be endured and even welcomed as the "price of freedom" if
the existing order is to stand without challenge.

COINTELPRO Techniques

>From its inception, the FBI has operated on the doctrine that the
"preliminary stages of organization and preparation" must be frustrated,
well before there is any clear and present danger of "revolutionary
radicalism."

At its most extreme dimension, political dissidents have been eliminated
outright or sent to prison for the rest of their lives. There are quite a
number of individuals who have been handled in that fashion.

Many more, however, were "neutralized" by intimidation, harassment,
discrediting, snitch jacketing, a whole assortment of authoritarian and
illegal tactics.

Neutralization, as explained on record by the FBI, doesn't necessarily
pertain to the apprehension of parties in the commission of a crime, the
preparation of evidence against them, and securing of a judicial
conviction, but rather to simply making them incapable of engaging in
political activity by whatever means.

For those not assessed as being in themselves, necessarily a security
risk, but engaged in what the Bureau views to be politically objectionable
activity, those techniques might consist of disseminating derogatory
information to the target's family, friends and associates, visiting and
questioning them, basically, making it clear that the FBI are paying
attention to them, to try to intimidate them.

If the subject continues their activities, and particularly if they
respond by escalating them, the FBI will escalate its tactics as well.
Maybe they'll be arrested and prosecuted for spurious reasons. Maybe there
will be more vicious rumors circulated about them. False information may
be planted in the press. The targets' efforts to speak in public are
frustrated, employers may be contacted to try to get them fired. Anonymous
letters have been sent by the FBI to targets' spouses, accusing them of
infidelity. Others have contained death threats.

And if the subject persists then there will be a further escalation.

According to FBI memoranda of the 1960s, "Key black activists" were
repeatedly arrested "on any excuse" until "they could no longer make
bail." The FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally
disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts, to xframe
COINTELPRO targets for crimes they knew they did not commit. In some cases
the charges were quite serious, including murder.

Another option is "snitch jacketing" - making the target look like a
police informant or a CIA agent. This serves the dual purposes of
isolating and alienating important leaders, and increasing the general
level of fear and factionalism in the group.

"Black bag jobs" are burglaries performed in order to obtain the written
materials, mailing lists, position papers, and internal documents of an
organization or an individual. At least 10,000 American homes have been
subjected to illegal breaking and entering by the FBI, without judicial
warrants.

Group membership lists are used to expand the operation. Anonymous
mailings of newspaper and magazine articles may be mailed to group members
and supporters to convince them of the error of their ways. Anonymous or
spurious letters and cartoons are sent to promote factionalism and widen
rifts in or between organizations.

According to the FBI's own records, agents have been directed to use
"established local news media contacts" and other "sources available to
the Seat of Government" to "disrupt or neutralize" organizations and to
"ridicule and discredit" them.

Many counterintelligence techniques involve the use of paid informants.
Informants become agents provocateurs by raising controversial issues at
meetings to take advantage of ideological divisions, by promoting emnity
with other groups, or by inciting the group to violent acts, even to the
point of providing them with weapons.

Over the years, FBI provocateurs have repeatedly urged and initiated
violent acts, including forceful disruptions of meetings and
demonstrations, attacks on police, bombings, and so on, following an old
strategy of Tsarist police director TC Zubatov: "We shall provoke you to
acts of terror and then crush you."

A concise description of political warfare is given in a passage from a
CIA paper entitled "Nerve War Against Individuals," referring to the
overthrowing of the government of Guatemala in 1954:

The strength of an enemy consists largely of the individuals who occupy
key positions in the enemy organization, as leaders, speakers, writers,
organizers, cabinet members, senior government officials, army commanders
and staff officers, and so forth. Any effort to defeat the enemy must
therefore concentrate to a great extent upon these key enemy individuals.

If such an effort is made by means short of physical violence, we call it
"psychological warfare." If it is focussed less upon convincing those
individuals by logical reasoning, but primarily upon moving them in the
desired direction by means of harassment, by frightening, confusing and
misleading them, we speak of a "nerve war". 8

The COINTELPROs clearly met the above definition of "nerve wars," and, in
the case of the American Indian Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the
FBI conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with death
squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala in more
recent years.

The full story of COINTELPRO may never be told. The Bureau's files were
never seized by Congress or the courts or sent to the National Archives.
Some have been destroyed. Many counterintelligence operations were never
committed to writing as such, or involve open investigations, and
ex-operatives are legally prohibited from talking about them. Most
operations remain secret until long after the damage has been done.



Murder and Assassination

Among the most remarkable of the COINTELPRO revelations are those relating
to the FBI's attempts to incite gang warfare and murderous attacks on
Black Panther leaders. For example, a COINTELPRO memo from FBI
Headquarters mailed November 25, 1968, informs recipient offices that:

a serious struggle is taking place between the Black Panther Party (BPP)
and the US [United Slaves] organization. The struggle has reached such
proportions that it is taking on the aura of gang warfare with attendant
threats of murder and reprisals.

In order to fully capitalize upon BPP and US differences as well as to
exploit all avenues of creating further dissension in the ranks of the
BPP, recipient offices are instructed to submit imaginative and
hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP. 9

According to the national chairman of the US organization, who became a
professor at San Diego State, the US and the Panthers had been negotiating
to avoid bloodshed: "Then the F.B.I. stepped in and the shooting started."

A series of cartoons were produced in an effort to incite violence between
the Black Panther Party and the US; for example, one showing Panther
leader David Hilliard hanging dead with a rope around his neck from a
tree. The San Diego office reported to the director that:

in view of the recent killing of BPP member SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon
is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of
the rift between BPP and US. This cartoon, or series of cartoons, will be
similar in nature to those formerly approved by the Bureau and will be
forwarded to the Bureau for evaluation and approval immediately upon their
completion.

Under the heading "TANGIBLE RESULTS" the memo continues:

Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in
the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific
counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this
over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is
directly attributable to this program.

Between 1968-1971, FBI-initiated terror and disruption resulted in the
murder of Black Panthers Arthur Morris, Bobby Hutton, Steven Bartholomew,
Robert Lawrence, Tommy Lewis, Welton Armstead, Frank Diggs, Alprentice
Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, John Savage, Sylvester Bell, Larry
Roberson, Nathaniel Clark, Walter Touré Pope, Spurgeon Winters, Fred
Hampton, Mark Clark, Sterling Jones, Eugene Anderson, Babatunde X
Omarwali, Carl Hampton, Jonathan Jackson, Fred Bennett, Sandra Lane Pratt,
Robert Webb, Samuel Napier, Harold Russell, and George Jackson.

One of the more dramatic incidents occurred on the night of December 4,
1969, when Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot to death
by Chicago policemen in a predawn raid on their apartment. Hampton, one of
the most promising leaders of the Black Panther party, was killed in bed,
perhaps drugged. Depositions in a civil suit in Chicago revealed that the
chief of Panther security and Hampton's personal bodyguard, William
O'Neal, was an FBI infiltrator. O'Neal gave his FBI contacting agent, Roy
Mitchell, a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which Mitchell turned
over to the state's attorney's office shortly before the attack, along
with "information" -- of dubious veracity -- that there were two illegal
shotguns in the apartment. For his services, O'Neal was paid over $10,000
from January 1969 through July 1970, according to Mitchell's affidavit.

The availability of the floor plan presumably explains why "all the police
gunfire went to the inside corners of the apartment, rather than toward
the entrances," and undermines still further the pretense that the barrage
was caused by confusion in unfamiliar surroundings that led the police to
believe, falsely, that they were being fired upon by the Panthers inside.
10

Agent Mitchell was named by the Chicago Tribune as head of the Chicago
COINTELPRO directed against the Black Panthers and other black groups.
Whether or not this is true, there is substantial evidence of direct FBI
involvement in this Gestapo-style political assassination. O'Neal
continued to report to Agent Mitchell after the raid, taking part in
meetings with the Hampton family and their discussion with their lawyers.

There has as yet been no systematic investigation of the FBI campaign
against the Black Panther Party in Chicago, as part of its nationwide
program against the Panthers.

Malcolm X was supposedly murdered by former colleagues in the Nation of
Islam (NOI) as a result of the faction-fighting which had led to his
splitting away from that movement, and their "natural wrath" at his
establishment of a separate mosque, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

However, the NOl factionalism at issue didn't just happen. It had been
developed by deliberate Bureau actions, through infiltration and the
"sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization,"
rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes.
11 The Chicago Special Agent in Charge, Marlin Johnson, who also oversaw
the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, makes it quite obvious
that he views the murder of Malcolm X as something of a model for
"successful" counterintelligence operations.

"Over the years considerable thought has been given, and action taken with
Bureau approval, relating to methods through which the NOI could be
discredited in the eyes of the general black populace or through which
factionalism among the leadership could be created. Serious consideration
has also been given towards developing ways and means of changing NOI
philosophy to one whereby the members could be developed into useful
citizens and the organization developed into one emphasizing religion -
the brotherhood of mankind - and self improvement. Factional disputes have
been developed - most notable being Malcolm X Little." 12

In an internal FBI monograph dated September 1963 found that, given the
scope of support it had attracted over the preceding five years, civil
rights agitation represented a clear threat to "the established order" of
the U.S., and that Martin Luther "King is growing in stature daily as the
leader among leaders of the Negro movement ... so goes Martin Luther King,
and also so goes the Negro movement in the United States." This accorded
well with COINTELPRO specialist William C. Sullivan's view, committed to
writing shortly after King's landmark "I Have a Dream" speech during the
massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., on August 28 of
the same year:

We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous
Negro in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the
Negro, and national security ... it may be unrealistic to limit [our
actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or
before Congressional Committees.

The stated objective of the SCLC, and the nature of its practical
activities, was to organize for the securing of black voting rights across
the rural South, with an eye toward the ultimate dismantlement of at least
the most blatant aspects of the southern U.S. system of segregation. Even
this seemingly innocuous agenda was, however, seen as a threat by the FBI.
In mid-September of 1957, FBI supervisor J.G. Kelly forwarded a newspaper
clipping describing the formation of the SCLC to the Bureau's Atlanta
field office - that city being the location of SCLC headquarters -
informing local agents, for reasons which were never specified, the civil
rights group was "a likely target for communist infiltration," and that
"in view of the stated purpose of the organization you should remain alert
for public source information concerning it in connection with the racial
situation." 13

The Atlanta field office "looked into" the matter and ultimately opened a
COMINFIL (communist-inflitrated group) investigation of the SCLC,
apparently based on the fact that a single SWP member, Lonnie Cross, had
offered his services as a clerk in the organization's main office. 14 By
the end of the first year of FBI scrutiny, in September of 1958, a
personal file had been opened on King himself, ostensibly because he had
been approached on the steps of a Harlem church in which he'd delivered a
guest sermon by black CP member Benjamin J. Davis. 15 By October 1960, as
the SCLC call for desegregation and black voting rights in the south
gained increasing attention and support across the nation, the Bureau
began actively infiltrating organizational meetings and conferences. 16

By July of 1961, FBI intelligence on the group was detailed enough to
recount that, while an undergraduate at Atlanta's Morehouse College in
1948, King had been affiliated with the Progressive Party, and that
executive director Wyatt Tee Walker had once subscribed to a CP newspaper,
The Worker. 17

Actual counterintelligence operations against King and the SCLC seem to
have begun with a January 8, 1962 letter from Hoover to Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, contending that the civil rights leader enjoyed a
"close relationship" with Stanley D. Levison, "a member of the Communist
Party, USA," and that Isadore Wofsy, "a high ranking communist leader,"
had written a speech for King. 18

On the night of March 15-16,1962, FBI agents secretly broke into Levison's
New York office and planted a bug; a wiretap of his office phone followed
on March 20. 19 Among the other things picked up by the surveillance was
information that Jack ODell, who also had an alleged "record of ties to
the Communist party," had been recommended by both King and Levison to
serve as an assistant to Wyatt Tee Walker. 20 Although none of these
supposed communist affiliations were ever substantiated, it was on this
basis that SCLC was targeted within the Bureau's ongoing
COINTELPRO-CP,USA, beginning with the planting of five disinformational
"news stories" concerning the organization's "communist connections" on
October 24, 1962. 21 By this point, Martin Luther King's name had been
placed in Section A of the FBI Reserve Index, one step below those
individuals registered in the Security Index and scheduled to be rounded
up and "preventively detained" in the event of a declared national
emergency; Attorney General Kennedy had also authorized round-the-clock
surveillance of all SCLC offices, as well as King's home. 22 Hence, by
November 8,1963, comprehensive telephone taps had been installed at all
organizational offices, and King's residence. 23

By 1964, King was not only firmly established as a preeminent civil rights
leader, but was beginning to show signs of pursuing a more fundamental
structural agenda of social change. Meanwhile, the Bureau continued its
efforts to discredit King, maintaining a drumbeat of mass
media-distributed propaganda concerning his supposed "communist
influences" and sexual proclivities, as well as triggering a spate of
harassment by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). 24 When it was announced
on October 14 of that year that King would receive a Nobel Peace Prize as
a reward for his work in behalf of the rights of American blacks, the
Bureau - exhibiting a certain sense of desperation - dramatically
escalated its efforts to neutralize him.

Two days after announcement of the impending award, COINTELPRO specialist
William Sullivan caused a composite audio tape to be produced, supposedly
consisting of "highlights" taken from the taps of King's phones and bugs
placed in his various hotel rooms over the preceding two years.

The result, prepared by FBI audio technician John Matter, purported to
demonstrate the civil rights leader had engaged in a series of "orgiastic"
trysts with prostitutes and, thus, "the depths of his sexual perversion
and depravity." The finished tape was packaged, along with an accompanying
anonymous letter (prepared by Bureau Internal Security Supervisor Seymore
F. Phillips on Sullivan's instruction), informing King that the audio
material would be released to the media unless he committed suicide prior
to bestowal of the Nobel Prize.

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great
liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough
frauds of their own but I am sure that they don't have one at this time
that is any where near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I
repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. ...

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You
have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for
a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. You are done.
There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy,
abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. [sic]. 25

Sullivan then instructed veteran COINTELPRO operative Lish Whitson to fly
to Miami with the package; once there, Whitson was instructed to address
the parcel and mail it to the intended victim. 26 When King failed to
comply with Sullivan's anonymous directive that he kill himself, FBI
Associate Director Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach attempted to follow through
with the threat to make the contents of the doctored tape public:

The Bureau Crime Records Division, headed by DeLoach, initiated a major
campaign to let newsmen know just what the Bureau [claimed to have] on
King. DeLoach personally offered a copy of the King surveillance
transcript to Newsweek Washington bureau chief Benjamin Bradlee. Bradlee
refused it, and mentioned the approach to a Newsday colleague, Jay Iselin.
27

Bradlee's disclosure of what the FBI was up to served to curtail the
effectiveness of DeLoach's operation, and Bureau propagandists
consequently found relatively few takers on this particular story. More,
in the face of a planned investigation of electronic surveillance by
government agencies announced by Democratic Missouri Senator Edward V.
Long, J. Edgar Hoover was forced to order the rapid dismantling of the
electronic surveillance coverage of both King and the SCLC, drying up much
of the source material upon which Sullivan and his COINTELPRO specialists
depended for "authenticity."

Still, the Bureau's counterintelligence operations against King continued
apace, right up to the moment of the target's death by sniper fire on a
Memphis hotel balcony on April 4, 1968. 28 By 1969, "[FBI] efforts to
'expose' Martin Luther King, Jr., had not slackened even though King had
been dead for a year." 29

Those seeking independence for Puerto Rico were similarly attacked. The
Bureau considered independentista leader Juan Mari Bras' near-fatal heart
attack during April of 1964 to have been brought on, at least in part, by
an anonymous counterintelligence letter:

[deleted] stated that MARI BRAS' heart attack on April 21, 1964, was
obviously brought on by strain and overwork and opinioned that the
anonymous letter certainly did nothing to ease his tensions for he felt
the effects of the letter deeply. The source pointed out that with MARI
BRAS' illness and effects of the letter on the MPIPR leaders, that the
organization's activities had come to a near halt.

[paragraph deleted]

It is clear from the above that our anonymous letter has seriously
disrupted the MPIPR ranks and created a climate of distrust and dissension
from which it will take them some time to recover. This particular
technique has been outstandingly successful and we shall be on the lookout
to further exploit the achievements in this field. The Bureau will be
promptly advised of other positive results of this program that may come
to our attention. 30

The pattern remained evident more than a decade later when, after
reviewing portions of the 75 volumes of documents the FBI had compiled on
him, Mari Bras testified before the United Nations Commission on
Decolonization:

[The documents] reflect the general activity of the FBI toward the
movement. But some of the memos are dated 1976 and 1977; long after
COINTELPRO was [supposedly] ended as an FBI activity ... At one point,
there is a detailed description of the death of my son, in 1976, at the
hands of a gun-toting assassin. The bottom of the memo is fully deleted,
leaving one to wonder who the assassin was. The main point, however, is
that the memo is almost joyful about the impact his death will have upon
me in my Gubernatorial campaign, as head of our party, in 1976. 31

When Mari Bras suffered from an attack of severe depression the same year,
the San Juan Special Agent in Charge noted in a memo to FBI headquarters
that, "It would hardly be idle boasting to say that some of the Bureau's
activities have provoked the situation of Mari Bras." Given the context
established by the Bureau's own statements vis a vis Mari Bras, it also
seems quite likely that one of the means by which the FBI continued to
"exploit its achievements" in "provoking the situation" of the
independentista leader was to arrange for the firebombing of his home in
1978.

Lethal COINTELPRO operations against the independentistas continued well
into the 1980s. As Alfredo Lopez recounted in 1988:

[O]ver the past fifteen years, 170 attacks - beatings, shootings, and
bombings of independence organizations and activists - have been
documented ... there have been countless attacks and beatings of people at
rallies and pickets, to say nothing of independentistas walking the
streets. The 1975 bombing of a rally at Mayaguez that killed two
restaurant workers was more dramatic, but like the other 170 attacks
remains unsolved. Although many right-wing organizations claimed credit
for these attacks, not one person has been arrested or brought to trial.
32

A clear instance of direct FBI involvement in anti-independentista
violence is the "Cerro Maravilla Episode" of July 25,1978. On that date,
two young activists, Arnaldo Dario Rosado and Carlos Soto Arrivi,
accompanied a provocateur named Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, were lured into
a trap and shot to death by police near the mountain village. Official
reports claimed the pair had been on the way to blow up a television tower
near Cerro Maravilla, and had fired first when officers attempted to
arrest them. A taxi driver who was also on the scene, however, adamantly
insisted that this was untrue, that neither independentista had offered
resistance when captured, and that the police themselves had fired two
volleys of shots in order to make it sound from a distance as if they'd
been fired upon. "It was a planned murder," the witness said, "and it was
carried out like that." What had actually happened became even more
obvious when a police officer named Julio Cesar Andrades came forward and
asserted that the assassination had been planned "from on high" and in
collaboration with the Bureau. This led to confirmation of Gonzalez
Molave's role as an infiltrator reporting to both the local police and the
FBI, a situation which prompted him to admit "having planned and urged the
bombing" in order to set the two young victim up for execution. In the
end, it was shown that:

Dario and Soto [had] surrendered. Police forced the men to their knees,
handcuffed their arms behind their backs, and as the two independentistas
pleaded for justice, the police tortured and murdered them. 33

None of the police and other officials involved were ever convicted of the
murders and crimes directly involved in this affair. However, despite
several years of systematic coverup by the FBI and U.S. Justice
Department, working in direct collaboration with the guilty officers, ten
of the latter were finally convicted on multiple counts of perjury and
sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 30 years apiece. Having
evaded legal responsibility for his actions altogether, provocateur
Gonzalez Molave was shot to death in front of his home on April 29,1986,
by "party or parties unknown." This was followed, on February 28,1987, by
the government's payment of $575,000 settlements to both victims'
families, a total of $1,150,000 in acknowledgment of the official
misconduct attending their deaths and the subsequent investigation(s).

Despite tens of thousands of pages of documentary evidence, the idea that
the Bureau would utilize private right-wing operatives and terrorists is a
chilling, alien concept to most Americans. Nevertheless, the FBI has
financed, organized, and supplied arms to right-wing groups that carried
out fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings. 34

This was the case during the FBI's COINTELPRO in South Dakota in the
1970's against the Oglala Sioux Nation and the American Indian Movement.
Right-wing vigilantes were used to disrupt the American Indian Movement
(AIM) and selectively terrorize and murder the Oglala Sioux people 35, in
what could only be described as a counter-insurgency campaign. During the
36 months roughly beginning with the 1973 seige of Wounded Knee and
continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty AIM members and
supporters died violently on or in locations immediately adjacent to the
Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others suffered violent physical
assaults. As Roberto Maestas and Bruce Johansen have observed:

Using only these documented political deaths, the yearly murder rate on
Pine Ridge Reservation between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was 170
per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit, the reputed "murder capital of the
United States," had a rate of 20.2 in 1974. ... The political murder rate
at Pine Ridge between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was almost
equivalent to that in Chile during the three years after the military coup
supported by the United States deposed and killed President Salvador
Allende. 36

To commemorate the 1890 massacre of Wounded Knee, in which 300 Minnecojou
Lakota were slaughtered by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, hundreds of Native
Americans from reservations across the West gathered in Wounded Knee, on
the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, during the winter of 1972-73.
37

This situation was already tense due to a series of unsolved murders on
the reservation, and a struggle between the administration of the Oglala
Sioux tribal president, Dick Wilson, and opposition organizations on the
reservation, including AIM. Wilson had been bestowed with a $62,000 Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA) grant for purposes of establishing a "tribal
ranger group" - an entity which designated itself as "Guardians Of the
OgIala Nation" (GOONs). Wilson's "goon squads" patrolled the reservation,
unleashing a reign of terror against Wilson's enemies. When victims
attempted to seek the protection of the BIA police, they quickly
discovered that perhaps a third of its roster - including its head, Delmar
Eastman (Crow), and his second-in-command, Duane Brewer (OgIala) - were
doubling as GOON leaders or members. For their part, BIA officials - who
had set the whole thing up - consistently turned aside requests for
assistance from the traditionals as being "purely internal tribal
matters," beyond the scope of BIA authority.

On Feb 28th, 1973, residents of Wounded Knee, South Dakota found the roads
to the hamlet blockaded by GOONs, later reinforced by marshals service
Special Operations Group (SOG) teams and FBI personnel. By 10 p.m.,
Minneapolis SAC Joseph Trimbach had flown in to assume personal command of
the GOONs and BIA police, while Wayne Colburn, director of the U.S.
Marshals Service, had arrived to assume control over his now reinforced
SOG unit. Colonel Volney Warner of the 82nd Airborne Division and 6th Army
Colonel Jack Potter - operating directly under General Alexander Haig,
military liaison in the Nixon White House - had also been dispatched from
the Pentagon as "advisors" coordinating a flow of military personnel,
weapons and equipment to those besieging Wounded Knee. As Rex Weyler has
noted:

Documents later subpoenaed from the Pentagon revealed that Colonel Potter
directed the employment of 17 APCs [armored personnel carriers], 130,000
rounds of M-16 ammunition, 41,000 rounds of M-40 high explosive, as well
as helicopters, Phantom jets, and personnel. Military officers, supply
sergeants, maintenance technicians, chemical officers, and medical teams
remained on duty throughout the 71 day siege, all working in civilian
clothes [to conceal their unconstitutional involvement in this "civil
disorder"]. 38

On March 5, Dick Wilson - with federal officials present - held a press
conference to declare "open season" on AIM members on Pine Ridge,
declaring "AIM will die at Wounded Knee." For their part, those inside the
hamlet announced their intention to remain where they were until such time
as Wilson was removed from office, the GOONs disbanded, and the massive
federal presence withdrawn.

Beginning on March 13, federal forces directed fire from heavy .50 caliber
machineguns into the AIM positions. The following month was characterized
by alternating periods of negotiation, favored by the army and the
marshals - which the FBI and GOONs did their best to subvert - and raging
gun battles when the latter held sway. Several defenders were severely
wounded in a firefight on March 17, and on March 23 some 20,000 more
rounds were fired into Wounded Knee in a 24-hour period.

The FBI's "turf battle" with the "soft" elements of the federal government
rapidly came to a head. On April 23, Chief U.S. Marshal Colburn and
federal negotiator Kent Frizzell were detained at a GOON roadblock and a
gun pointed at Frizzell's head. By his own account, Frizzell was saved
only after Colburn leveled a weapon at the GOON and said, "Go ahead and
shoot Frizzell, but when you do, you're dead." The pair were then
released. Later the same day, a furious Colburn returned with several of
his men, disarmed and arrested eleven GOONs, and dismantled the roadblock.
However, "that same night... some of Wilson's people put it up again. The
FBI, still supporting the vigilantes, had [obtained the release of those
arrested and] supplied them with automatic weapons." The GOONs were being
armed by the FBI with fully automatic M-16 assault rifles, apparently
limitless quantifies of ammunition, and state-of-the-art radio
communications gear. When Colburn again attempted to dismantle the
roadblock:

FBI [operations consultant] Richard [G.] Held arrived by helicopter to
inform the marshals that word had come from a high Washington source to
let the roadblock stand ... As a result the marshals were forced to allow
several of Wilson's people to be stationed at the roadblock and to
participate in ... patrols around the village. 39

On the evening of April 26, the marshals reported that they were taking
automatic weapons fire from behind their position, undoubtedly from GOON
patrols. The same "party or parties unknown" was also pumping bullets into
the AIM/ION positions in front of the marshals, a matter which caused
return fire from AIM. The marshals were thus caught in a crossfire. At
dawn on the 27th, the marshals, unnerved at being fired on all night from
both sides, fired tear gas cannisters from M-79 grenade launchers into the
AIM/ION bunkers. They followed up with some 20,000 rounds of small arms
ammunition. AIM member Buddy Lamont (Oglala), driven from a bunker by the
gas, was hit by automatic weapons fire and bled to death before medics,
pinned down by the barrage, could reach him.

When the siege finally ended through a negotiated settlement on May 7,
1973, the AIM casualty count stood at two dead and fourteen seriously
wounded. An additional eight-to-twelve individuals had been "disappeared"
by the GOONs. They were in all likelihood murdered and - like an untold
number of black civil rights workers in the swamps of Mississippi and
Louisiana - their bodies secretly buried somewhere in the remote vastness
of the reservation.

Of the 60-plus murders occurring in an area in which the FBI held
"preeminent jurisdiction," not one was solved by the Bureau. In most
instances, no active investigation was ever opened, despite eye-witnesses
identifying members of the Wilson GOON squad as killers.

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Gerald Heaney, after reviewing numerous court
transcripts and FBI documents, concluded that the United States Government
overreacted at Wounded Knee. Instead of carefully considering the
legitimate grievances of Native Americans, the response was essentially a
military one.

While Judge Heaney believed that the "Native Americans" had some
culpability in the firefight that day, he concluded the United States must
share the responsibility. It never has. The FBI has never been held
accountable or even publicly investigated for what one Federal petit jury
and Judge Heaney concluded was complicity in the creation of a climate of
fear and terror on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Other AIM casualties include Richard Oaks, leader of the 1970 occupation
of Alcatraz Island by "Indians of All Tribes," who was gunned down in
California the following year. Larray Cacuse, a Navajo AIM leader, was
shot to death in Arizona in 1972. In 1979, AIM leader John Trudell,
preparing to make a speech in Washington, was told by FBI personnel that,
if he gave the speech, there would be "consequences." Trudell not only
made his speech, calling for the U.S. to get out of North America and
detailing the nature of federal repression in Indian country, he burned a
U.S. flag as well. That night, his wife, mother-in-law, and three children
were "mysteriously" burned to death at their home on the Duck Valley
Reservation in Nevada.



Agents Provocateurs

Many details are now available concerning these extensive campaigns of
terror and disruption, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups
organized and financed by the national government, but primarily through
the much more effective means of infiltration and provocation of existing
groups. In particular, much of the violence that occurred on college
campuses can be attributed to government provocateurs.

The Alabama branch of the ACLU argued in court that in May 1970 an FBI
agent "committed arson and other violence that police used as a reason for
declaring that university students were unlawfully assembled" -- 150
students were arrested. The court ruled that the agent's role was
irrelevant unless the defense could establish that he was instructed to
commit the violent acts, but this was impossible, according to defense
counsel, since the FBI and police thwarted his efforts to locate the agent
who had admitted the acts to him. 40

William Frapolly, who surfaced as a government informer in the Chicago
Eight conspiracy trial, an active member of student and off-campus peace
groups in Chicago, "during an antiwar rally at his college, ... grabbed
the microphone from the college president and wrestled him off the stage"
and "worked out a scheme for wrecking the toilets in the college
dorms...as an act of antiwar protest." 41

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a
bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb
would be killed. This was in Seattle, where it was revealed that FBI
infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and
bombings of university and civic buildings, and where the FBI arranged a
robbery, entrapping a young black man who was paid $75 for the job and
killed in a police ambush. 42

In another case, an undercover operative who had formed and headed a
pro-Communist Chinese organization "at the direction of the bureau"
reports that at the Miami Republican convention he incited "people to turn
over one of the buses and then told them that if they really wanted to
blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the gas tank and light it." They were
unable to overturn the vehicle. 43



The Ku Klux Klan

During the 1960's, the FBI's role was not to protect civil rights workers,
but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted
the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror.

Church Committee hearings and internal FBI documents revealed that more
than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI
agents or informants. 44 However, Bureau intelligence "assets" were
neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active
participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of
some 50 civil rights activists by 1964. 44

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all
Klan units. 45 Needless to say, the informants gained positions of
organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan's fascist agenda.
Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only
confirm the infiltrator's loyalty and commitment.

Unlike slick Hollywood popularizations of the period, such as Alan
Parker's film, "Mississippi Burning," the FBI was instrumental in building
the Ku Klux Klan in the South,

"...setting up dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public
spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan
killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to
fire shots at her rather than 'blow his cover.' One FBI agent, speaking at
a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, 'We
will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.'" 46

Throughout its history, the Klan has had a contradictory relationship with
the national government: as a defender of white privilege and the
patriarchal status quo, and as an implicit threat, however provisional, to
federal power. Depending on political conditions in society as a whole,
vigilante terror can be supplemental to official violence, or kept on the
proverbial shortleash. 47 As a surrogate army in the field of terror
against official enemies, the Klan enjoys wide latitude. But when it moves
into an oppositional mode and attacks key institutions of national power,
Klan paramilitarism - but not its overt white supremacist ideology - is
treated as an imminent threat to the social order, suppressed, but never
destroyed, unlike other COINTELPRO target groups.

These roles are not mutually exclusive. As anti-racist researcher Michael
Novick warns: "The KKK and its successor and fraternal organizations are
deeply rooted in the actual white supremacist power relations of US
society. They exist as a supplement to the armed power of the state,
available to be used when the rulers and the state find it necessary." 48

The Klan's "supplemental" role, particularly as a private armed force
sporadically deployed to arrest the development of movements for Black
freedom, is best considered by comparison to other Bureau operations.
Unlike other COINTELPROs, the "Klan - White Hate Groups" program was of a
different order entirely. Senior FBI management and a majority of agents
in the field endorsed the Klan's values, if not the vigilante character of
their tactics; from militaristic anti-communism to extreme racial hatred;
from ultra-nationalism to misogynist puritanism. 49

This was evident during the civil rights struggles of the sixties, when
Freedom Riders and local community activists directly confronted hostile
police forces - many of whom were openly allied with the Klan. Despite
clear jurisdictional authority to enforce federal law, the FBI
consistently refused to protect civil rights workers under attack across
the South. More than once, the Bureau refused to warn those under imminent
threat of violence.

FBI inaction in the area of civil rights enforcement wasn't simply a
matter of what the Pike Committee of the House of Representatives dubbed
"FBI racism." Rather, FBI bureaucratic lethargy, when it came to
protecting Black lives, underscored its mission against subversion for
constituents whose privileges and power were threatened by a militant
movement for Black rights. 50

Strikingly different from anti-communist COINTELPROs that enmeshed broad
social sectors in a web of entanglements, FBI monitoring of the Klan was
strictly confined to the organization itself. No serious efforts were made
to explore the supplemental role of White Citizens' Councils, many of
which were active Klan fronts, let alone investigate the obvious and
widespread police complicity in racist violence. 51 Bureau surveillance of
the Klan was purely passive, hardly the directed aggression reserved for
left-wing targets.

In May, 1961, as civil rights activists turned up the heat, the FBI passed
information to the Klan about Freedom Rider buses on their way to
Birmingham, Alabama. A police sergeant, Thomas Cook, attached to the
Birmingham police intelligence branch was plied with reports by Bureau
informants. A Klan member himself, Cook furnished this information to
Robert Shelton's Alabama Knights and arranged several meetings to discuss
"matters of interest." Cook supplied Klan leaders with the names of
"inter-racial organizations," the location of meetings, and the membership
lists of civil rights groups for circulation in Klan publications. FBI
informant Gary Thomas Rowe wrote a confidential memo to the Birmingham
Special Agent in Charge (SAC) stating that Cook had handed over
inter-office intelligence memos on civil rights activists during a Klan
meeting. Rowe insisted that Cook not only gave him relevant information
that police had in their files, but urged Rowe to "help himself to any
material he thought he would need for the Klan." 52

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Birmingham SAC called Cook and informed him of the progress that Freedom
Rider buses had made and when they were scheduled to arrive in the city.
According to Rowe, Cook and Birmingham's public safety director,
arch-segregationist Eugene "Bull" Connor conspired with Klan leaders and
directly organized physical attacks on Freedom Riders when the buses
reached their destination. According to one FBI memo, Connor declared: "By
God, if you are going to do this thing, do it right." 53

In consultation with Shelton's group, Birmingham police agreed not to show
up for 15 or 20 minutes after the buses pulled in, to give Klansmen
sufficient time to carry out their attack. Assailants were promised
lenient treatment if through some fluke, they managed to get arrested.
During a planning meeting that finalized logistical details, Grand Titan
Hubert Page advised Klansmen that Imperial Wizard Shelton had spoken with
Detective Cook, and was informed that Freedom Rider buses were scheduled
to arrive at 11:00 am.

Earlier that day, the KKK intercepted another bus on its way to
Birmingham, beating the passengers and setting the vehicle ablaze. As
agreed during consultations with Klan leadership, when the buses arrived
no police were present at either of Birmingham's bus terminals, but 60
Klansmen - including Rowe - were waiting. Klansmen attacked civil rights
workers, reporters and photographers, viciously beating anyone within
reach with chains, pipes and baseball bats.

According to ACLU attorney Howard Simon, "We found that the FBI knew that
the Birmingham Police Department was infiltrated by the Klan, that many
members of the police department were Klan members, that they knew a
person in intelligence was passing information directly to leaders of the
Klan, and they also knew their undercover agent had worked out an
agreement with the police department to stay away from the terminals. They
knew all that and still continued their relationship with the police
department." 54

Though the Bureau claimed that its "Klan - White Hate Groups" COINTELPRO
was launched in order to stifle white supremacist activities, the
historical record proves otherwise. The more well known, but by no means
only examples of Klan terror during the period - the 1963 bombing of the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four black children; the 1964
murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in
Mississippi: and the 1965 assassination of Viola Liuzzo and her companion
near Selma, Alabama, point to knowledge of the crimes, and complicity in
subsequent cover-ups by FBI officials.

Bureau informant Gary Thomas Rowe was a central figure in some of the most
publicized crimes of the period, indulging in freelance acts of racist
terror. He was suspected of involvement in firebombing the home of a
wealthy Black Birmingham resident, the detonation of shrapnel bombs in
Black neighborhoods and the murder of a Black man during a 1963
demonstration. He became a prime suspect in the Birmingham church bombing
after he failed two polygraph tests. His answers were described by
investigators as "deceptive" when he denied having been with the Klan
group that planted the bomb. 55

Despite enough evidence to open a preliminary investigation, the FBI
refused, covering-up for Rowe even when another informant, John Wesley
Hall, named him as a member of a three-man Klan security committee holding
veto power over all proposed acts of violence. Years later, an independent
inquiry uncovered evidence that Hall became a Bureau informant two months
after the bombing and despite the fact that a polygraph test convinced the
Alabama FBI that he was probably involved in the attack himself, Hall
admitted to having moved dynamite for the plot's ringleader, Robert E.
Chambliss, a Klan member since 1924. Even though court testimony and a
wealth of evidence linked Hall, Rowe and other members of the Alabama
Knight's to the bombing, the suspects were convicted on a misdemeanor
charge - "possession of an explosive without a permit." It took more than
a decade and three bungled investigations to finally convict Chambliss of
the crime. 56

In July 1997, almost 35 years after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
bombing, the FBI re-opened its investigation based on "new information."
However, mainstream news accounts failed to report the piv