The limits of dissent:
covert surveillance of activists in America
By Stephen Bergstein
IN THE EARLY-MORNING hours of Dec. 4, 1969, exactly 20 months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, 21-year-old Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was murdered in is sleep during a ten minute shootout by 14 Chicago police officers. "After having failed in its efforts to get Hampton rubbed out by local street gangs, the FBI arranged to have the job done by a special squad of police assigned by the state's attorney's office," writes lawyer-activist Brian Glick. Hampton, who earlier that year became chair of the militant party after his predecessors were jailed or hid in exile, had assumed de facto leadership of the African-American movement after the killings of Malcolm X and Dr. King.
Hampton was not the only one killed in the incident. Ninety bullets were fired by the police -- as opposed to one by the Panthers -- killing Mark Clark, a minister's son and Panther organizer who coordinated a breakfast program for children. Several others were injured. But the killing of Hampton was, if one was needed, a clear signal to Black activists that prior FBI threats against Dr. King were not minor transgressions but calculated efforts to curb a Black movement that posed a serious threat to the white-controlled status quo. If necessary, the bureau would go straight to the top.
In fact, FBI repression against African-American civil rights was in itself no isolated program. American history is littered with examples of protest -- and democracy-bashing by the U.S. government which, despite rhetorical support for the right to disagree with official policy and develop political freedom, both openly and secretly works against these noble ideals. Our Constitutional founding fathers warned against "the michiefs of faction" whose wants and goals require the filter of "a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country." Post-Revolutionary War lawmakers agreed to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized the dissemination of information meant to criticize the government. The Constitution itself prevent women, Blacks and Native Americans--more than half the population --from voting and still provides for indirect public selection of the president through an appointed Electoral College not legally required to follow the public's choice.
Post 18th century American activists also faced threats and roadblocks. The Iran-contra hearings of 1987 exposed a planned but unexecuted maneuver drafted in part by Oliver North that would invoke martial law in the United States in the event of a potentially-unpopular invasion abroad, presumably Nicaragua. According to the Miami Herald, a suspension of the Constitution and transferring of power to the Federal Emergency Management Agency would accompany such a move and put into the hands of military commanders the power to run state and local government.
From the founding fathers 200 years ago to the Democratic-Republican consensus today, an overriding goal of U.S. politics has been to isolate popular movements and sentiment in favor of private, or corporate, power. A reading of the Constitution finds checks and balances on public power through three branches of government catering to different constituencies. The 435-member House of Representatives, considered most responsive to public mood, has less power than the 100-member Senate which, in turn, wields less influence than the Executive Branch, with two elected officials and an un-elected bureaucracy numbering in the thousands. But there are no limits on private power fueled solely by profit and which to a considerable extent both supplies the major political parties with candidates and exerts great influence on them. Said founding father Governor Morris of Pennsylvania, "There never was, nor will there ever be a civilized cociety without Aristocracy." Another founding father, John Quincy Adams, wrote that the Constitution was "calculated to increase the influence, power and wealth of those who have any already." Not surprisingly, those over whom the Consititution would direct-- the people --were not permitted to vote on whether to ratify it, except for those living in Rhode Island, who voted against it by a 10-1 margin. Notes of the discussions at the Consititutional Convention were not publicized until 53 years after they were taken.
The past generation alone saw vigorous efforts by the government to maintain population control, over African-Americans in particular. Two examples should suffice: The "Crisis of Democracy" and the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, commonly known as COINTELPRO.
"Crisis of Democracy" was a term used by the Trilateral Commission in the mid-1970s to signify the newly-awakening domestic population that over the last decade or so had shook the country by questioning U.S. policy in the Vietnam War, women's and civil rights, among others. Made up of wealthy and politically influential figures from North America, Western Europe and Japan, the Trilateral Commission sought economic interdependence among the global powers and included Democrats and Republicans who saturated subsequent presidential administrations. A United States section of a Trilateral Commission report, titled "The Crisis of Democracy," decried the decrease in political apathy and rise in activism among previously silent segments of the population. The report said, in part: "Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled to before."
The report adds: "The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups." The "Crisis of Democracy" report may constitute the most candid admission on the part of U.S. elite of their contempt for democracy and public participation in civic life.
Under COINTELPRO, federal police surveillance and disruption of the groups mentioned in the quotes presented above began in the mid-1950s, when the United States Communist Party came under attack by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI at the height of McCarthyism. Among those targeted were Martin Luther King, the NAACP and the National Lawyer's Guild. Other organizations under the eye of Big Brother were the Socialist Workers Party, including those who supported or worked with it, like Malcolm X; the new left, made up of students, anti-war activists, environmentalists, feminists and lesbian and gay rights activists; and groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico. But perhaps the most brutal treatment by federal officials were against Blacks.
One advantage the FBI has when carrying out its surveillance and disruption tactics is the failure of media and academia to give proper treatment to this issue. Activists warning others of phone-tapping, mail confiscation and rigged trials are often told by non-believers that they are paranoid. Evidence to prove the validity of the war on political freedom stems from the amount of documents surfacing after the disclosure of COINTELPRO and the amount of space devoted at the FBI building to political policing. While many important files have been destroyed and others still under wraps, and with former operatives acknowledging that the most heinous acts were never committed to writing, "a total of 2,370 official-approved COINTELPRO actions were admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and thousands more have since been uncovered," according to Jerry Fresia. He wrote in 1988 that the new FBI building in Washington allocates 35,000 linear feet to domestic intelligence files, as opposed to 23,000 linear feet for everything else.
American courts have recognized the illegality of COINTELPRO. In a lengthy ruling issued in 1986, Federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled for the plaintiffs in holding:
"This opinion will not attempt to deal with the question of whether, under certain extreme circumstances involving a group planning sabotage or violence, disruptive activities by the Government might be warranted. But no such thing was involved in the present case. By the time the FBI commenced its SWP [Socialist Worker's Party] Disruption Program in 1961, the FBI had been investigating the SWP for about 20 years. The FBI had accumulated evidence of a variety of lawful political pursuits by the SWP, but no evidence of sabotage or violence or anything else of that nature. During the time of the FBI's disruption operations, the picture changed not at all. These disruption operations were directed at the kind of political activities that the SWP had a constitutional right to carry out. Of course, the FBI had in mind the Marxist ideology of the SWP, and its teachings about ultimate revolution, but there is no evidence of any revolutionary activities towards which the disruption operations were directed. There can be no doubt that these disruption operations were patently unconstitutional and violated the SWP's First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. Moreover, there was no statutory or regulatory authority for the FBI to disrupt the SWP's lawful political activities. As to the surreptitious entries, they were obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment. The FBI knew this full well. There was no statutory or regulatory authorization for such operations. Even if there was high official authority to engage in surreptitious entries in cases of genuine threat to the national security, there is no evidence of any such authority to burglarize for the purpose of obtaining information about peaceful political activities. By the time the FBI bag jobs against the SWP commenced in 1958, the FBI had no reason to believe that it would find material relating to anything other than lawful pursuits, and this is all that it did find."
Unlike the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, scholars have not been able to find smoking gun evidence proving FBI complicity in the killings of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Documents clearly indicate an FBI dislike for both men. King was the target of a program intended to drive him to suicide, and the agency takes credit for having developed a dispute between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, which led to his death just as he called for a socialist solution to that country's ills and, like King, made the connection between U.S.-supported repression at home and abroad. "He warned Blacks against voting for the Democrats and Republicans. He said Blacks had to unify in their own independent movement to win any changes in society," writes author Nelson Blackstock in his study of COINTELORO. "More and more he reached the conclusion that Blacks had to oppose capitalism..."
FBI attacks on the Black Panthers included the following:
- The hiring of infiltrators to spy on and create tensions between members to irreparably damage the movement. This strategy also created paranoia among party members who out of desperation tried, often erroneously, to finger undercover agents.
In the case of Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party chief of security and Hampton bodyguard William O'Neil was actually an FBI informer who, it is speculated, heavily drugged Hampton just before the ambush by Chicago police that killed him. O'Neil also provided police with a detailed floorplan of the room in which Hampton was shot, and tried to provoke Hampton to undertake criminal actions to advance the Black Panther cause, suggestions which Hampton ruled out and which cost O'Neil his job as security chief for the organization. In addition, O'Neil sabatoged talks between the Black Panthers and the Socialist Workers party and physically attacked other movement activists. For his work, O'Neil was given a bonus by the FBI and thanked for his work.
- Psychological warfare to undermine the Black Panthers. Movements were often undermined by FBI-sponsored news articles containing false information that tarnished the image of the organization in question. Phony leaflets and phone calls, letters and threats-- difficult to identify as FBI-instigated --also came into play.
According to Brian Glick, forgery experts at the FBI, using information secured through electronic surveillance of Panther homes and offices, successfully shattered trust between Panther organizers in the United States and Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who was in exile in Algeria, by sending bogus letters in the name of an intermediary. The letters "inflam(ed) intraparty mistrust and rivalry until it erupted into a bitter public split that shattered the organization in the winter of 1971." Authentic-looking FBI letters also were used to prevent different movements from banding together as one by threatening violence and accusing other activists of sexual infidelity. In one anonymous letter fabricated by the FBI, a fictitional Black woman writes:
Dear Mr.
Look man I guess your old lady doesn't get enough at home or she wouldn't be shucking and flying with our Black men in ACTION, you dig? Like all she wants to integrate is the bed room and us Black Sisters ain't gonna take no second best from our men. So lay it on her, man -- or get her the hell off (unintelligable).
A Soul Sister
This letter led the husband of a white civil rights and anti-war activist to file for divorce. As always, it encouraged suspicion among different movements.
- Harassment through the legal system was another COINTELPRO offshoot. Grand juries were convened by the FBI and Justice Department to convict on charges of overtly political crimes. Agents also singled out tax returns by activists for meticulous audits and threw others in jail in flimsy charges. Agents were told by their higher-ups that the "purpose...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." Fred Hampton was sent to jail for but a few hours so he could not appear on a popular talk show. He was released when the show ended.
The events preceding and following Hampton's murder are a good case study of the workings of a purposefully manipulated legal system to destroy the Black Panthers. Months before he died, FBI and Chicago police officers succeeded in throwing Hampton in jail for three months on old trumped-up charges of stealing $71 worth of ice cream. "Immediately following the raid (that killed Hampton) two responses emerged -- a concerted campaign to cover up the facts which would continue for years and involve every level of government, and a massive, sustained rejection from the Black community," according to the Guardian newspaper.
State Attorney Edward Hanrahan's charges that the Panthers opened fire on the police was exposed as a lie when witnesses spoke up and newspaper photographs supplied by his office showing bullet holes by the Panthers turned out to be nail heads. Hanrahan was also found to have arranged a deal whereby no indictments would come out of the grand jury investigating the case in return for his dropping charges against the Panthers and keeping silent about FBI involvement. The case went to trial in 1976 as the government turned over 225 documents it said composed all information pertaining to the raid. "But the documents released by the Senate Select Committee, then investigating FBI and CIA, while the trial was underway showed that the FBI and U.S. Attorney-- with active collaboration of Federal Civil Court Judge Sam Perry, who was hearing the case --had hidden information clearly showing the FBI involvement in the raid. 25,000 FBI documents were turned over," according to the Guardian. After a trial that saw Perry verbally abuse and jail attorneys for the plaintiffs, the federal government, Cook County and the City of Chicago in 1983 settle the lawsuit for $1.85 million. "The government never explicitly acknowledged its guilt, and the killers-- those who pulled the triggers and those who set up the raid as part of the war on the (Black Panthers Party) --were never punished," the Guardian states.
Extralegal force and violence, too, was a tool to undermine the Constitutionally protected political freedom. The killing of Fred Hampton was one of the more notable examples but FBI documents indicate agency ties with the Ku Klux Klan, organized crime and street gangs to force African-American activists that "...if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries," in the words of one FBI communique.
In one case of a governmental assault of American activists, a Jackson, Mississipi-based movement newspaper, called Kedsu, had its offices searched twice by agents who threatened to kill several staffers just prior to that paper's sponsoring of a conference of alternative newspapers. Later, local police broke into the building, held eight occupants at gunpoint and produced a bag of marijuana that led to their arrest. A COINTELPRO operation to sabotage a political campaign targeted in 1961 New York City mayoral candidate Clarence Franklin, a Black man who campaigned on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Franklin, according to writer Nelson Blackstock, picked up an arrest record during his years as a New York City dishwasher, porter and construction laborer. "That fact is not very unusual; many Black workers in this society find themselves in trouble with the law -- prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned out of proportion to their numbers in the population. One good example of this discrimination is the virtually all-Black composition of prison death rows," Blackstock writes. "One might assume that a law enforcement agency such as the FBI would have noted with satisfaction that Franklin had not been charged with violating any law in several years and was currently engaged in perfectly legal activity -- running for public office." But on election day the Daily News ran a story on Franklin's arrest, violating the rules of fair play established between Democrats and Republicans that ban last-minute campaign smears. "When Franklin eventually withdrew from political activity, the FBI congratulated itself on a job well done," according to Blackstock.
Although it is likely the COINTELPRO program no longer exists, insofar that it no longer goes by that name, it is certain that the federal government continues surveillance and disruption against U.S. activists, particularly those opposing the war in Iraq and President Bush's efforts to enforce the PATRIOT Act. Under the guise of the "War on Terror," Attorney General Ashcroft in 2002 authorized the FBI to loosen the guidelines against domestic spying efforts. These guidelines were put in place after Congress investigated COINTELPRO during the mid-1970's.
In addition, In the mid-1980's a COINTELPRO-like effort to undermine a variety of political movement came to light that implicated the government in attacks that took place during the years of the Reagan administration. Targeted for attack were groups advocating peace in Central America, independence for Puerto Rico, self-determination for Palestinians and victims of apartheid. Efforts were also taken to undermine the popularity of presidential aspirant Jesse Jackson and Americans traveling to Nicaragua or Cuba during the 1980s were also harassed. "World-renowned feminist author Margret Randall, a former U.S. citizen who returned home after several years in Cuba and Nicaragua, was denied permanent residence status and ordered to leave the United States solely on the basis of the political content of her writings," according to Brian Glick.
In addition, the Reagan administration legalized previously illegal covert surveillance against political activists through Executive order 12999 of Dec. 4, 1981. The order also permitted the CIA to apply its foreign infiltration activities to the domestic arena for the first time since its inception in 1947. According to Nation magazine, a program launched in the early 1990's involved the taping by police officers of conversations between convicts and their lawyers. This program extended to all phone conversations being recorded among police officials themselves. "A manufacturer and distributer of phone taping equipment, who asks not to be identified, says the revelations so far are just the tip of the iceberg. 'I talk to colleagues all the time for whom this police work is big business,' he says. 'You have many parts of the country where no police have even heard of...privacy. It's very common for police to tape every phone call under their roofs. They think it's their right," according to The Nation.++
*****
Sources:
Black, Curtis "The Murder of Fred Hampton" The Guardian Dec. 20, 1989
Blackstock, Nelson COINTELPO: The FBI's Secret War On Political Freedom (New York, Vintage Books) 1976
Crozia, Michael J. et at The Crisis of Democracy (New York, NYU Press) 1975
Fresia, Jerry Toward An American Reyolution, Exposing The
Constitution And Other Illusions (Boston, South End Press) 1988
Glick, Brian War at Home (Boston, South End Press) 1989
Gordon, Diana R. "Can Sessions Tame the Bureau?" Nation, Oct. 30, 1989
Lindorf "Oliver's Martial Plan" Village Voice July, 21, 1987
Shapiro, Bruce "Are your local police listening?" Nation Feb. 5, 1990
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